Let's Go Vegan
View the entire case study on the desktop version of this webpage joshuadema.com
View the entire case study on the desktop version of this webpage joshuadema.com
Researching a specialised customer segment for a lifestyle blog/website and improving website information architecture
Short on time?
Quick Summary
1. Problem
Let's Go Vegan is a lifestyle website for vegans and plant based eaters. They would like to understand their customers in order to improve their website
2. Research Insights
89% of people who turned vegan did so due to animal cruelty. People did not find the current Let's Go Vegan website easy to use.
3. Solution
We redesigned the look and feel of the clients website addressing issues such as information architecture and category customisation
Project Overview
Let’s Go Vegan is a website and community dedicated to providing information and education on how to go vegan for the Australian consumer.
The objective of the website is to make the transition to a vegan lifestyle easy and enjoyable by providing recipes, product details, media, interviews and updates on vegan news from around the world and locally in Australia.
My Role
Tools
The Team
Josh Dema
Tom Cox
Alvin Yip
Charu Grover
Figma
Miro
Google Forms
UX Research
Affinity Mapping
Ideation
Rapid Prototyping
Usability Testing
Stakeholder
Management
Time Frame
2 Weeks
The Brief
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Improve the User Experience of the site, help Vegans find information
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Explore any design changes for greater user interaction and experience
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Better deliver the clients goal goal of helping people go vegan
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Identify areas of opportunity for future content creation
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Enable capability for writers & bloggers to contribute to the site
Maslow is a digital assistant to the rehabilitation journey for young people with a spinal injury.
The Maslow app helps young people inform their daily habits, to maintain compliance to vital health management activities such as respiratory health, pressure care management, and mental health.
Our Process
We followed the Double Diamond from end to end, delivering a high fidelity website prototype at the end of the two week sprint
DISCOVER
12
one-on-one
Interviews
3
Different Surveys
154
Survey Responses
Surveys
The team created a survey using Google Forms to collect quantitative information on our target audience: Vegans and Plant-based eaters. We distributed this survey via multiple methods to maximise our reach.
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The clients Instagram page
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Vegan Facebook groups
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Reddit
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Vegan Blogs
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Our own networks
We began to understand what types of people are likely to be in the Vegan audience, and what their primary motivations are.
Initial Findings
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Ethical and animal cruelty reasons
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Physical health and well-being
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18-35 year old common age bracket
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75%+ female
Google and Instagram Analytics
Our research indicated that 80% of the of the people that were using Instagram were female in the age group 25-34, mostly based in Melbourne and Sydney.
Who is coming to the Website?
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71% female
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45% aged 25-34
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25% aged 18-24
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Bounce rate of 73% (50% is acceptable)
Who are their Instagram Audience?
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80% female
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Predominantly aged 25-34
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Most in Melbourne and Sydney
The Spectrum of Plant-Based Eating
I created a visual representation of diet types from omnivores (meat-eating) to Vegans (plants only)
Interviews
The team conducted 12 interviews in order to get a deeper understanding of the pain points that Vegans and Plant-Based eaters may experience. The Vegans that I spoke to were very generous with their time and gave me a valuable insight into their lifestyle.
A diet or a lifestyle?
We wanted to understand:
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Why they chose to go vegan
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What challenges did they face when they first went vegan
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Where do they go for information about veganism
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What ongoing challenges to they experience in maintaining their vegan lifestyle
Ethical Reasons
Many people reported watching a vegan documentary or learning about the cruelty in the animal industry as the reason they went vegan
Personal Health
The other main group was people who transitioned to veganism in the hopes of improving their own personal health. This group sometimes started off as Flexitarians before going fully vegetarian or vegan
Affinity Mapping
The team used a Miro board to synthesise our findings
Affinity Mapping Board
What We Found
Vegan Pain Points
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Time spent researching and preparing vegan meals
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Cooking vegan foods
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Living with a partner who was not vegan
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Dining out with friends
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Eating out can be a hastle
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Getting nutrition right can be difficult
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The cost of premium vegan products
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Social aspects, some people reported a stigma against veganism
DEFINE
User Personas
In order to visually represent our research findings, we created a primary and secondary persona. These user personas represent an aggregate of the needs, motivations, pain-points and goals we found in our research.
User personas were a useful tool in communicating with out client, and enabled them to get on the same page as us in our understanding of the user.
Samantha
Kelly
Primary Persona
Samantha Jones, is 24 year old registered nurse who recently went vegan after learning about the animal industry. Sam's primary motivation for going vegan is to counter animal cruelty, and she wants to have her voice heard! Dubbed the "Instagram vegan" Sam uses her pseudo-influencer status on Instagram to raise awareness about her cause.
Samantha's pain points include not being comfortable eating out with friends, she wants more 'veganised' versions of omnivorous foods such as vegan mac-and-cheese.
Secondary Persona
Kelly Knox is a recently qualified therapist living in suburban Melbourne. Kelly has been a plant based eater for 5 years and likes to feel good about what she is putting into her body. As a busy professional Kelly doesn't have a lot of time to research vegan recipes, go shopping, or cook meals. Sometimes she starts to feel fatigued during the day when she has not eaten the right nutrients.
Kelly needs a way to quickly access information on vegan foods, and to know exactly how to get the right nutrition.
Journey Map
Another artefact we developed was a journey map.
This map documents the emotional highs and lows of Sam's journey into veganism. Sam watches a documentary on animal cruelty and has a strong emotional reaction, enough to make her research more into the mistreatment of animals by the food industry. Sam makes a commitment to go vegan (without fully understanding it!) and spreads her thoughts on Instagram to her network.
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How Might We...?
At this point we had a strong understanding of our user base including their needs, desires, and pain points. It was time to write our "How Might We" Statements.
How Might We provide resources to vegans so that their daily lives are more easy and effortless
How Might We give Sam the tools to lead a Seamless Vegan lifestyle
How Might We reduce the amount of food prep and cooking time for the time-poor vegan so they can fit veganism into their lifestyle.
How Might We increase our reach
for LetsGoVegan to non-instagram users
DEVELOP
IDEATION and MVP
In good UX style we facilitated a co-creation ideation workshop with the client. We used a process called crazy 8's to come up with ideas. We kept our personas mind during this process, ensuring that our proposed solutions would meet their needs.
We mapped our ideas onto a MVP venn-diagram of Desirability, Feasibility and Viability. This process helped us to assess which of our ideas would be suitable to move forward with.
One of our early ideas was a Vegan Food Delivery Service. However we decided to pivot away from this idea keeping in mind we only had two weeks with the client. This solution was not viable.
The result of the ideation session was to redesign the Let's Go Vegan website, optimising it for the needs of users just like Sam and Kelly
SOLUTION
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Testing the Current Website
At this point in the process we ran some usability test on the current let's go vegan website, to determine what was not working well. See what some of our testers had to say below
"I wasn’t sure where to look for reasons to go vegan"
"I wasn’t sure where to look for reasons to go vegan"
"I'm frustrated by the lack of partial or predictive search on the search bar"
The search interface is not intuitive, took me a while to figure out where do I need to enter search text in the box
Card Sorting Dendrogram
A card sorting activity was used to understand the natural associations between currently existing categories on the website. Our dendrogram showed us that the current website Information Architecture was not logical for users.
Card Sorting Dendrogram
User Flow
Using the results from card sorting, I designed a new user flow, keeping in mind that users would be visiting the website from either Instagram or from their desktop computer.
We wanted to put our personas first, and cater to Kelly with her need for quick access to recipes, health and nutrition, and Samantha, who is focused on being apart of that vegan community, and being able to share resources.
User Flow
DELIVER
Key Features
In response to our current state usability testing, we identified the following features to add/change on the website.
We could see these features directly addressing our persona pain points, for example
Location-based search would to address the social needs of Samantha who found eating out a major pain point. Whereas a new recipe filter would allow Kelly to save time when shopping and cooking vegan meals
It was time to prototype and test
Key Features
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Clear Mission Statement
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Location Based Search
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Improved Site Navigation
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Filter Recipes
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Reduce Scrolling on pages
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Vegan Community Page
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Rating and Sharing Functions
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Enquiry Form
Prototyping
Our website design went through three stages of development, Low Fidelity, Mid Fidelity and High Fidelity.
Low Fidelity
Medium Fidelity
High Fidelity
In order to validate our website design, our team conducted 3 rounds of testing (low, medium, and high fidelity) in order to check feature desirability and reveal possible usability problems.
Our testing goals were to:
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Validate that the features we added were desirable to the target users
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Test the changes we made to the client website's information architecture to facilitate easier navigation
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Capture real reactions to the new features we had designed
Time to test
Testing Feedback
Feature
Test Feedback
We kept track or our user testing throughout the process, this helped us with our final design
Description
Painpoint
The Final Product
After implementing our testing feedback we presented the final product back to the client.
The client were very happy with the thorough research and understanding we had of the customer. They indicated their excitement to implement the website features we had designed
"We really felt that you and the team were 'all in' and the data/wireframes and feedback will be an invaluable asset to us, so thank you."
- Feedback from Let's Go Vegan Founders
Watch a video of the high fidelity prototype here, showcasing all the new features
REFLECTION
Things I learned from this project
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Client Management - Our client was not very clear about what they wanted us to deliver at the very start of the sprint. This taught me a valuable lesson in using that first meeting to really understand what their goals are.
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Scope - In the first week we cast our research net very wide, while we got a very good understanding of the customer base, many of our proposed solutions were not viable within a 2-week timeframe
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Platform - In our research we identified that a large portion of users would access the website from their phone, if we had more time we would have designed a responsive mobile version of the page too.
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Design System - Our prototyping process was slowed down by a lack of cohesive design system. In the future I would implements a design system so components would not have to be created at each iteration.
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