Foodie Fanatic
REDESIGN A FOOD COMMERCE SITE
Information Architect | June - August 2020
Created in Summer 2020 for an assignment from the University of Washington Information Architecture course. As the LS2K consulting team, we were hired to redesign the website for Foodie Fanatic, a food wares and recipe website. For this project, we created a set of deliverables from a project plan and user interviews to a final presentation.
Contributors include Lessi Coulibaly (Product Manager), Kresta Desposato (Taxonomist and Content Strategist), Kari Simonsen (UX Designer/Information Architect), Sneha Upadhyay (Information Architect).
User Interviews
Our task was to design a set of user interview questions that could be used to investigate how to improve the overall user experience on the redesign project website. We created a questionnaire with both closed and open-ended questions in order to gain insight into what needs and accessibility issues users were having. This user research would help us to improve our design.
Information Personas
Based on the main user types our team identified for Food Fanatic, we developed information personas. The goal of these information personas is to identify characteristics of each particular user type, the kinds of information that they need/desire for the website, and how and why the users would want the information. From there we generated possible user journeys.
Decomposing Competitor Websites
In order to provide the best design for Foodie Fanatic, our team looked at a few different competitor websites, such as New York Times Cooking and William & Sonoma. We analyzed the physical placement of content and implied relationships, successful attributes of their design, and elements where we saw opportunity for improvement such as the social media aspect.
Wireframes
We began our wireframing process on paper and tablet, then translated the designs into Whimsical, a software for prototyping sample content in order to illustrate what would the website redesign would look like. The wireframes were also used to demo user flows.
Taxonomy
We built a basic three-level tagging taxonomy for Foodie Fanatic to assist with search and findability, based off our competitor research and improvements we identified. We performed corpus analysis and extracted terms from related databases and web sources to increase the robustness of our taxonomy.
Card Sort
In order to test our taxonomy, we created a card sort through Optimal Sort. We listed potential concepts on the left hand side, and asked users to test our taxonomy by dragging those concepts to the top level concept cards on the right.
Although we did not have the capacity to perform user testing during the course of this project, we trialed the card sort amongst ourselves and made modifications to our taxonomy accordingly.
Site Map
We designed a three tier site map for Foodie Fanatic, to demonstrate how different sections of the site are related . We adjusted our site map based off of our card sort. In addition, we drew for additional relationship lines between concepts beyond just hierarchical to expand Foodie Fanatic’s usability.
