background
Peace Coffee is an awesome fair trade, organic coffee roaster based in Minneapolis. Peace’s old website was built in 2011 on a now-obsolete platform that didn’t offer many of the ecommerce features that are considered standard these days.
We had budgeted nine months to focus on user research and content strategy before moving into the design phase of our project. However, we were forced to cut our timeline in half when leadership decided to move from Salesforce to Netsuite just a few months before the holiday season. I pared down the content strategy and ux design activities to the bare minimum to launch the website by our new deadline.
scope
- Stakeholder interviews
- Defining user groups
- Analytics reporting
- Competitive analysis
- Content audit
- Core models
- Sketching + wireframes
- Mood boards
specs
- Designed in 2018
- Developer: Bicycle Theory
Carrie kept our team productive and focused during our expedited timeline for the new site. She added huge expertise every step of the way. She's flexible and capable of playing many roles from project manager, content strategist, UX developer and designer, team cheerleader, basically whatever we needed from her she found a way to help us add value to our new website. The results speak for themselves and are a testament to her incredible work ethic and skills!
overview
content audit
Peace staff performed a quantitative and qualitative audit of 100 pages on their old site to assess what content needed to be improved, updated, created and removed.
core models
We identified the most important pages on the site and decided what elements were needed on each page. These helped us think through potential entrance and exits to each page and created a common understanding of user needs, business goals and how different pages should be connected.
analytics reporting, sketching + competitive analysis
Using the information we’d gathered through user and stakeholder research as our foundation, I performed a competitive analysis of other coffee and out-of-industry websites for new ideas and best practices, checked assumptions and users’ needs in Google Analytics, and then created multiple lo-fi sketches for the team to provide feedback before moving on to the wireframe. Analytics was crucial in this stage to solve differing design opinions.
wireframes + mood boards
Using the information we’d gathered through user and stakeholder research as our foundation, I performed a competitive analysis of other coffee and out-of-industry websites for new ideas and best practices, checked assumptions and users’ needs in Google Analytics, and then created multiple lo-fi sketches for the team to provide feedback before moving on to the wireframe. Analytics was crucial in this stage to solve differing design opinions.
preliminary indicators
The new website launched December 1, 2018 and is a drastic improvement over the previous site. While not enough time has passed to draw strong conclusions from Analytics, the new site is already outperforming the old site. Here are a few results from the first two months compared to the same period the previous year:
- Ecommerce conversion rate has increased 18%
- Transactions are up 25% and revenue up 4%
- Coffee subscriptions up 1,000%
- Overall site bounce rate decreased 7%
- Mobile traffic bounce rate decreased 10%
Carrie's support as a UX designer gave our website the boost we needed to become a competitive ecommerce site. Her work laid the foundation for explosive online sales growth. I'm grateful for her teaching and ever-present reminders to help us continuously improve and grow.
