Context

Overview

This redesign is a pro-bono project for a local berry farm specializing in haskap berries. I chose to take on this project because I support local agriculture in propelling the haskap berry to become a major superfood available in stores nation-wide, boosting Canada's agricultural economy in a way unmatched anywhere else in North America. I would like to show my support by contributing my design skills to improve the website experience, which would increase website traffic and raise awareness of the haskap berry.

Kirkaberry Farms use ecwid to power their ecommerce, probably for the simplicity of use (can just tack it on to an existing website) and low bar of entry compared to rivals like Shopify

My Role

For the original redesign, I offered to make them a UI redesign of the website backed by user research. As a team of one, I took on the roles of UX researcher, UX designer, and UI designer by conducting an online survey, drawing insights from results, analyzing the Kirkaberry Farms website using the 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, and visually and functionally redesigning the website.

For this shopping experience redesign, my role is to find the pain points in just the shopping experience. This includes going from the landing page to the product page, then adding products and checking them out. Then, I will redesign the shopping experience and process based on resolving the challenges found. In the redesign I will use the redesigned UI from before.

Research

Research Methodologies Used

Qualitative user interest survey was first conducted. Sample size was 28 responses, with most users being between ages 20-35, living in urban areas. Nature of questions included:
- How fruit consumption fits into their lifestyle
- Familiarity with haskap berries initial assessment
- Openness to consumption of haskap berries’
Competitive Analysis with local flour supplier Flourist

The Kirkaberry farms online shopping experience was compared with the Flourist online shopping experience. Though they are different products with different physical locations and different markets, Flourist was chosen because
- it’s also a Canadian-owned province based in British Columbia
- it has a market for B2B as well as B2C
- it also sells speciality, less commonly found products with lesser known health benefits (ie. organic wheat berries, red fife flour)
- it leverages Shopify for a more sophisticated shopping experience, which can inform UX decisions for Kirkaberry Farms
Ecommerce experience of Kirkaberry Farms website and Flourist website was compared against on the metrics:
- site structure
- product pages
- checkout flow
- educational content
Comparison was done on the desktop version of both websites

Key Findings

User Interest Survey

60% of respondents see fruit consumption to be a nice-to-have

78.6% have not heard of the haskap berry before