Toronto Cupcake

Toronto Cupcake is a bakery in Toronto, Canada that received low reviews on its web design on Google Reviews. As a UX Researcher, I am well aware that this can really hurt a business’s brand. Below is a usability study I did with three other UX Researchers on this bakery’s website.

TEAM

Usability Testing

Moderating Test Session & Notetaking

Qualitative Research

Test Documentation (Screeners, Moderator Scripts, & Participant Packets)

Affinity Mapping

Synthesis and Figma Slide Deck

Presentation of Findings

Gabriel Najera

Riya Sinha

Aayush Jain

Yuci (Abby) Luo

Swaraj Saha

DELIVERABLES

Project Overview

Business Needs:

Our team’s study pinpointed the exact areas in Toronto Cupcakes’ website that users had the most pain with and uncovered the most valuable insights for a re-design of Toronto Cupcake’s website.

Methodology:

  • We conducted a Competitive Analysis and a Heuristic Evaluation.

  • We also conducted five moderated in-lab usability tests.

Competitive Analysis

As part of the exploration phase in our research process, we researched 10 other companies that Toronto Cupcake competes with. Our analysis identified the strengths and weaknesses of these competitors and the noteworthy features of each company.

From the competitive analysis, we determined that Toronto Cupcake would benefit from the following:

  1. Increasing social media presence with marketing and promotional offers

  2. Enhancing website usability, improving content clarity and aesthetics of website interface

  3. Partnering with local stores and delivery partners to increase delivery options

  4. Launching a mobile app for customers

  5. Improving clarity as to available delivery locations

  6. Implementing a cart checkout that aligns with real-world conventions

Click the button below to view our Competitive Analysis slide deck.

Heuristic Evaluation

Our Heuristic Evaluation uncovered basic infractions of usability principles and rated the violations according to degree of severity. The principles and severity ratings we used are shown below.

From our evaluation, we determined that 5 heuristics warranted the most urgency to fix and this determination was further validated by the usability testing that followed with our participants. Our Heuristic Evaluation can be viewed by clicking the button below.

Participant Demographics

Recruitment Criteria

We determined that our target audience of customers consisted of dessert enthusiasts with online food shopping experience. We created a screener and recruited our participants for usability testing.

  • Our participants were screened along the following criteria:

    1. Gender mix: Three female and two male participants.

    2. Age: A mix of participants between 23-26 years old.

    3. Interest in purchasing cupcakes

    4. Have e-commerce shopping experience: All participants had experience ordering/purchasing items on the internet.

Our screener can be viewed by clicking the button below.

Usability Testing

Our team conducted five in-person usability tests. I was the moderator for two of these tests and the notetaker for one of them. We video-recorded each usability test and had each participant rate the ease of each task on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being ‘very easy’ and 5 being very difficult.’ From our usability tests, we created an affinity map and gathered the following insights:

Insights

  • Participants found navigation to be very confusing, they encountered problems in moving back and forth between pages.

  • The location of some of the features such as “Cart” did not align with users’ existing mental models.

  • Participants found parts of the website to be text-heavy and had poor legibility.

  • Users found some of the tasks time-consuming and frustrating. Particularly because of the need to repeat input of the same information or trouble in finding content.

  • Participants were expecting basic features like a search bar, filters, and content sorting options to better find the products they were looking for.

Recommendations

  • Add navigation at the top of the page to enhance content disoverability

  • Add website footer

  • Add navigation breadcrumbs

  • Add a search bar to facilitate a user’s search

  • Make fonts larger and more consistent

  • Place a cart icon int he top navigation bar

FINAL REPORT