Bakery's menu and ordering app 

UX design case study

Project: February - April 2023

My roles: UX designer, UX researcher

Responsible for concept and design – paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting user interviews and usability studies, securing accessibility, iterating on designs and refining the product. 

Local Bakery «The Bun» is favored  place in a living area, located in historic building. Usual bakeries' customers like the place and products, but they prefer to manage their busy lifestyles and avoid waiting in line.

Bakery would like to serve visitors better and increase popularity among young and middle aged customers. App should increase planned visits, drive sales and increase customer satisfaction.

How to balance user wishes and Bakery's abilities in one menu and ordering app? 

TASK

Develop engaging menu and ordering app for bakery’s customers the same time balance user wishes with Bakery’s resources.

First user interviews led to two main user personas  

«I would order from bakery when I am in a big rush or if I have to bring somebody else food. It would save time and I get a fresh, tasty meal.» 

​​​​​​​“I would buy something sweet for events, family or colleagues at work. We don’t eat much pastries at my personal events, but for more official events I would buy some cake.” 

I emphasized with users and started to sketch their happy path, screens, then made first digital wire-frames. 

At first I thought that it would be great to create an option to reserve a spot in the bakery. That would give an option to get their favorite spot to have meal in the Bakery. During the design process and collaboration with bakery's management, I decided to skip spot booking flow, because I noticed risks in bakery's work processes. They could not secure booked spots and good intentions may turn into customer frustrations, even conflicts. Instead of spot booking I concentrated on solution how to supply app users with attendance information and created option to check busy hours.  

Iterated on designs before and after user studies, improving user journey... 

During usability study several users asked about payment on pick-up. Screen for payment details were refined in line with whole checkout process and payment method selection added to screen.

While conducting usability study I noticed, that users get annoyed to accept rules repeatedly if they decide to edit order. I made a decision to optimize the whole checkout process: rules, date/time selection, order summary screens. This lead to much smoother ordering process.

During the design process it was a challenge to maintain balance.

Considering bakery’s location in historic building I wanted to give slight "vintage touch» to the design, but the same time tried to avoid becoming «old school». I created few hand drawn elements to be in line with bakery's logo.

I had to exclude some of user wishes in order to keep processes manageable - for  example in cake ordering process – no personalized text on cake except birthday number. Opening up endless possibilities for creating text would lead to uncontrollable amount of options. Repeated user studies proved, that users like process as it is. 

For me as a designer, it was a pleasure to see how much fun the users had putting together a cake in my app!

I managed to balance user expectations with processes of delivering good service from Bakery's side. 

"Cake ordering is easy and interesting, I was surprised!" 

"I liked Special Occasion cake ordering. It was fun! I would order cake via this app." 

Scan QR code and visit app's prototype or use link.

My contacts: kagelv@outlook.com