Case Study: La Villa Bakery

E-commerce web adapted to the business model

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In the second week of the bootcamp, the second challenge my teammates and I faced was to create a small business e-commerce site of our choice.

So, neither short nor lazy, my new teammates and I went looking for businesses.

Briefing

After looking for businesses, we decided to choose La Villa bakery, a small business that stands out for its quality-price and the origin of its products, totally handmade and daily elaboration.

Once the business was selected, the real challenge began, to create an e-commerce adapted to their needs and interests.

Time limit to develop the project was 5 days.

Role

Once again, together, we decided to develop and work on all the tools together. New team, new opinions, new ways of seeing things and a lot to learn from everything and everyone.

Research

In this case we started the project looking for information about the competition and creating a SWOT of the business to analyze the situation and the base from which we started.

Based on the information gathered, we developed a Lean Survey and conducted several interviews. At the end of our study we managed to conduct a total of 51 surveys and 12 interviews, which led us to the following points:

• About 75% of the respondents and interviewees bought these products in stores close to home.
• 68% of users place orders for celebrations and parties.

With the data collected, we made the Lean UX Canvas.

image Lean UX Canvas

Of course, throughout the process we had to come back to this document several times and perform some iteration.

Empathize

By analyzing all the data we collected from surveys and interviews, we were able to put ourselves a bit in the shoes of our potential users. So we saw the following problems:

• Most of the respondents buy bakery when they see them live, otherwise, they don’t buy them except for orders for celebrations.
• They usually buy in nearby specialized or trusted stores. In some cases, they order bakery products from their trusted stores through apps, although few of them have this digital ordering process. And they tend to recommend them whenever they can.
• The quality of the products and their daily elaboration is something highly valued by 60% of the interviewees.

We made an Empathy Map that helped us to get closer to the user and a User Persona that helped us to get even closer to the situation. From there, Rocío Martín emerged, a very social person with little time who likes meals with friends and bakery.

Define

With the User Persona in mind, we thought about what a day’s journey would be like when our user needed the application or solution we were looking for. From there, we came up with the User Journey.

After finishing with the previous tool we used a new tool that helped us to see how we would solve the problems that our user would face, User Scenario.

After all this learning about our users and analysis, we clearly saw that the needs of this business were the following:

• Organization of the informative content they had on the current website.
• Improve the visualization of the products and catalog, emphasizing the handmade aspect and daily elaboration.
• Create an online sales system to facilitate access to regular users and facilitate their recommendation by sharing the web link of the business.
• Give the possibility to place orders of the user’s choice in advance, in other words, to program an order.

Ideate

At this point we were clear about the problem at hand and what we needed to solve. So we did a Brainstorm where we all could express ourselves and look for ideas, we made a Card Sorting to several people to understand how it would be clearer for users to navigate and a Site Map to see how to finish organizing the information to facilitate the user navigation along with the information collected from the Card Sorting.

Afterwards, we performed a User Flow, which helped us to clarify which steps our user would follow and not to leave anything out due to a lack of clarity.

Next, we went through the Crazy8 process individually, which we ended up showing each other, explaining our mental process to reach the decisions we had made. And finally, we took the best ideas and approaches to move on to the next point.

Prototype

With all the solutions proposed to the users’ problems, we made a prototype for web service, without forgetting the needs of the business.

This process was tested by several users and corrected several times. In the process that follows the user we show:

1. How a user accesses the candy catalog.
2. The user configures a customized tray of cakes to your liking.
3. He can see the product information sheet to check the allergens and elaboration processes of the cake in question.
4. The user makes a personalized purchase process without the need to register.

And our result was this Mid-Fidelity prototype.

Next Steps

We value helping the user by giving the possibility of repeating an order that has already been placed in the past by creating an order history for those who are registered. In this way, users could place the order in a faster and more efficient way without spending too much time.

Learning

Each and every one of the members were very present in the process contributing, and the ideas were incredible, so deciding on just one and in a consensual way was complicated. We learned how to debate, explain and expose ideas to the rest of the team, how to manage time properly and how complicated it is sometimes to make a decision, as well as all the new tools that helped us to achieve our goal, such as Site Map, Card Sorting and User Flow.

Great experience to learn from team, let’s keep learning.