Cake-Opolis Website

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The Problem: Cash strapped, busy individuals desire the ability to purchase basic, good quality event cakes quickly and for a reasonable price.

The Goal: Design a website for Cake-Opolis that allows users to easily order a basic wedding cake with minimal user steps.

For this project, I was tasked with creating a flow to order cakes from a bakery. I served in the role of the lead UX designer responsible for bringing the Cake-Opolis website from conception to completed design. Additionally, I served as the point person for researching, interviewing, wireframing and protoyping.

Who are Our Users?

I conducted preliminary interviews with:

5 users
2 female, 2 male, 1 non-binary
between the ages 21-61
all are users who have ordered sweets online in the past

to better understand the pain points of customers who order cakes and sweet treats online.

Basic Interview Questions

In your opinion, what steps are absolutely necessary to complete a cake order online?
Would you explain the times in your life where you were overwhelmed by ordering cake or sweets online?
What options would you like to see from an online cakery?
What are the top 3 events for which you would buy a cake online?

I used the data from those interviews to create a persona, a journey map and an empathy map to help develop my problem statement and steer my design direction.

Problem Statement:

Patty is a busy professional and mother

who needs to have a smooth customer service experience because the cake is time sensitive.

Persona

Mapping Patty’s user journey revealed how helpful it would be to have an entirely online process for users who want to save time and money ordering their celebration cakes.

Journey Map

Patty's empathy map helped me understand her motivations and dissect what she says from how she feels.

This helped me to make decisions about the design, that she didn't directly express to me as important even as she exhibited the desire for certain design choices.

Empathy Map

Three major pain points stood out from the interviews:

Cash strapped customers have a difficult time purchasing wedding cakes that won’t cause budgetary problems.

In this digital world it is still difficult to conduct a quick cake buying process online.

Many cake shops offer an overwhelming selection of cake and icing flavor combinations.

Who's Our Competition?

I performed a competitive audit of both direct and indirect competition in order to get a better picture of the types of app features that work for users and the details that could use improvement.

Wireframes

Using the information I learned from the interviews and the competitive audit, I began initial sketches for the panels for the Cake-Opolis website.

Here I highlighted a number of my favorite featured that I later utilized in the completed designs.

I then created digital wireframes making sure to keep efficiency a priority of my design before moving on to the next round of testing.

Multiple easy- to-find places on the homepage to enter the flow

Maintaining a way for special orders to be completed

I created a low-fidelity prototype using the completed set of digital wireframes. The primary user flow I connected was ordering a General 3-Tier Wedding Cake, so the prototype could be used in a usability study.

Click here or on the picture above to check out the user flow.

Research Study

Methodology

Usability Study- remote in their homes
Participants will complete an individual order according to their own personal search style
Questionnaire to be completed afterwards to gauge user experience.
Participants are given a questionnaire afterward concerning their experience.
Each session is a maximum of 20 minutes.

Participants

5 Participants
- People who have ordered celebratory cakes from a bakery in the past
- 2 male, 2 female, 1 non-binary
- aged 21-60
- 1 assistive technology users

Research Questions

What steps are absolutely necessary to have a good experience ordering a wedding cake online?

Which steps complicate customer order flow?

What constitutes a good customer ordering experience?

How many cake options are too many?

Key Peformance Indicators

Time on Task

System Usability Scale

User Error Rates

Organizing the Research Results

I took detailed notes of each interview including my prompts as well as observations made during each interaction. Below are the notes for Participant E.

I then organized the observations into an affinity diagram in order to pin down themes surrounding the participants' user experiences.

Research Results Summary after Two Usability Study Rounds

1. There were still too many options for cake and icing flavors for people who want their cakes fast and low cost. Three of each is sufficient.

2. Users want an option for a lower cost, fair priced, quality cake as opposed to having to speacial order a much more expensive cake.

3. Users don't mind a plain, minimally decorated cake.

Mock Ups & Digital Wireframes

Mock ups of the digital wireframes were created, linked together for a high-fidelity prototype.

Before Usability Study

After Usability Study

More Mock Ups

High Fidelity Prototype with Connections

The final high-fidelity prototype presented a much cleaner user flow for buying a low-cost, time-saving cake. It also simplified the need for overwhelming options.

Click here or on the picture to check out the hi-fi prototype.

Take Aways & Next Steps

This website helps users who are short on time and cash or who simply wish to save money, realize the dream of having a high quality cake for their events. This is particularly true as users have become more tech savvy.

“I thought buying a wedding cake would be overwhelming but my experience with this website taught me that I’ve been stressing out over nothing.“

~Participant D

Impact

The next steps should include:

Test how many low cost cake options are too overwhelming for customers.
Having a base level priced low cost cake but testing how many add-on options could be included to both keep the cost below that of a special order cake and users from becoming overwhelmed by the number of choices .