The Cheeseboard Of Harrogate
The Cheese board of Harrogate is the finest cheese monger in Yorkshire, probably The North. It stocks speciality cheeses from the UK and from Europe. It really is something special.
Role
Visual Design
Time Line
October 2019
Tasks & Deliverables
- Interviews
- Testing
- Competitor Analysis
- Journey Map
- Task Flows
- Interaction Map
- Interactive Prototype
- WordPress Build
- Deploy
Project Overview
I had been contacted by Gemma Aykroyd about the redesign of The Cheeseboard’s site – the view was to create a site where the owner could eventually get to the point where cheese could be sold online.
Researching The Browsing Experience
This was done through participant interviews and Analytics. I then went about and put pen to paper to flesh out a few ideas. Did you know that in retail – most viewers are casual, without intent to purchase. Although this is industry specific…
User interviews helped provide some interesting insights into the goals, the context of use and pain points users often face when searching online for specialist food stuffs I learned that the majority of visits to the app were to see what the shops contact details were and their opening hours.
Defining The Problem
The Cheeseboard of Harrogate’s existing site had aged badly – it was fun and approachable but it did not give the store an air of authority. They sell luxury food stuffs; we needed a site to represent this.
Clustering the qualitative research data into groups showed consistent themes in where v1 of the website for The Cheeseboard went wrong. I saw that other specialist food stores sites’ efforts to help users browse and plan their shopping were well received, but that all the achieved was to overwhelm the user. On every click the audience number halves.
Design Problems
My next step was to move into the design phase and to begin thinking about possible solutions. Research had shown that users had a strong idea of what they think a food website should be like (think; supermarkets), so I primarily focused on getting rid of snags that the user would hit, when they try and tune in to the station on the new app.
I then began sketching and iterating on possible solutions for the different screens that the site would have. To do this, I began by determining the high level navigation for the App in very rough sketches, before refining the best ideas and moving on to sketching out full screens and interactions necessary to complete the primary flow.
Designing Solutions
My aim was to provide an intuitive, frictionless listening process that offers new features for the specific use cases of returning customers and first time shoppers, the former of which research had shown were most common in terms of site visits.
Home Page & Menu
A simple set up was made so that people could keep heading back to the home page and easily access the pages of the site.
Product Page
One page, one function – One of these pages was created for each product that the stakeholder had on the shop – it is easy to convert this in to a fully functioning shop at the drop of a hat.
Contact Page
In many ways this is the most important page on this build – the shop is still not yet open so the clientele are local; they need to find out where the shop is and when it is open.
During Lock Down 1, 2 + 3 the shop ran a delivery option for people in Harrogate – it was the lifeblood of the cheese community.
Next Steps
I look forward to making this site in to a fully functioning eCommerce solution – it just needs some code removed and then payment can be taken.
Conclusion
I really enjoyed this build – plus part of the maintenance package is that I get some cheese as a wage!