Cooking with Crickets
Preparing the Harmony Cricket Farm website for market expansion
Project Overview
Client
Harmony Cricket farm sells crickets as food for human consumption. Their current product line features protein powder, flour and cookies, all made with crickets. Their online store is their primary retail presences, with the occasional pop-up at a Farmer’s Market.
Photo via HarmonyCricket.farm
Problem
Harmony Cricket Farm is preparing for a market expansion. In Preparation, they wanted an audit of their website to discover and fix any problems before expansion.
Photo via HarmonyCricket.farm
Solution
After a heuristic analysis, and remote moderated usability study, it was discovered that changes to the website organization, legibility, engagement, transparency, and accessibility were recommend. A report featuring recommendations was submitted to the client.
The best way to bring value to our users is to uncover what is most important to them
The Journey
Heuristic Analysis
After Receiving the creative brief from the client, my first step was to do a heuristic analysis using Shneiderman’s 8 Golden Rules of Interface Design.
The Heuristics I measured for were:
Strive for consistency
Seek universal usability
Offer informative feedback
Design dialogs to yield closure
Prevent errors
Permit easy reversal of actions
Keep users in control
Reduce short-term memory load
Selection from the heuristic analysis
User Goal:
Our User is an adventurous eater,
Who wants a heathy and evirolentaly concusses way to add protein to their diet.
Research
To better understand how users engaged with the Harmony Cricket Farm website, my research team and I conducted remote moderated usability studies.
Findings
After synthesizing the data, I discovered the following key findings.
Organization: Study participants could not find answers to their own questions on the site
Legibility: Study participants struggled to read some of the copy on the site.
Engagement: Study participants were disappointed when engaging with the blog and nutritional information.
Transparency: Study participants wanted information if that was not available on the site.
Accessibility: Study participants using screen readers would not be able to understand important parts of this site
To provide value to our users, we would need to find solutions to address the issues surrounding those key findings.
Conducting a remote usability study
Script for the usability study
Something as simple as changing the font can have a huge impact on usability.
Report
The report I submitted to the client featured the 5 key findings divided into observations and recommendations. I included screen shots of both the observations and well as recommendations. To help Harmony Cricket Farm implement the recommendations, I included a section were I organized the recommendations by difficulty.
Executive summary of the report
Explaining the findings related to Organization
I organized the recommendations by difficulty to implement.