HARMONY CRICKET FARM
USABILITY REVIEW AND REDESIGN PROPOSAL
CHALLENGE
Harmony Cricket Farm stakeholders approached us to review their website in order to gain insight into how well its current user experience matches the expectations of their users.
SOLUTION
Following a usability review and remote user testing, I prepared a recommendations report including suggestions related to hierarchy, visibility, and navigation to enhance the website’s usability.
TOOLS AND METHODS
Usability Evaluation
Moderated Remote User Testing (Think-Aloud Method)
Zoom
Sketch
Keynote
USERS
Primary Users: Adventurous eaters looking to experiment with insects-as-food, and healthy or environmentally-conscious consumers looking to try foods that benefit their health and the planet.
Secondary Users: Potential retailers and distributors looking to learn more about the product.
MY ROLE
My team and I conducted and observed remote usability tests, and worked together to synthesize our research data. I, alone, was also responsible for performing a usability review with hypotheses and writing a findings and recommendations report.
DIVING INTO THE SPACE
To determine how best to direct our questions during usability testing, my team and I conducted separate usability reviews using Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. I wanted to find out more about where exactly opportunity areas were on the Harmony Cricket Farm website, begin determining potential solutions, and familiarize myself with the website’s information architecture and user flow to more readily conduct usability testing.
Findings showed three main areas for opportunity.
Ease for finding important information (how to use products, background knowledge of the company, and why consumers should care about crickets) was made difficult with long and unbroken text throughout various instances on the website.
Ease of product selection and checkout was hindered by lack of clarity on shipping information and additional costs, as well as the presence of unnecessary and broken product-filtering features.
The visibility of information on the website was poor due to chosen font sizes and styles, a broken zooming feature on product images, and the lack of accessibility to images containing nutritional information.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
My team and I combined our insights to create a usability test script and research protocol. We recruited participants for ten self-sourced and four in-lab usability tests. These tests were all remote, moderated, 30 minute sessions via Zoom, and utilized user think-aloud testing strategy.
We conducted these tests to gather information about basic user understanding of Harmony Cricket Farm and its products, uncover pain points in website navigation and product purchasing, and to determine suggestions for improvement.
“Oh, literal crickets!”
Participants expressed surprise for the concept this unique product, and, while many were intrigued by the website’s content, users struggled to determine exactly how to find information such as where the products are sourced and how to use them.
“I figured it out, but it took a lot of exploring and a lot of clicks”
Overall, participants were successful throughout the product selection and checkout processes, however there were some common pain points. The Shop page featured a broken and unusable filter, users had to scroll far down to add an item to their cart, and there was unconventional placement for detailed shipping information. Participants were able to find most of the information they were looking for about the company and its products, but it took a lot of time, navigation, and clicking around the website. And, while participants could find most of the information they needed, the text was often too long, took a long time to read, or was too small. Likewise, the extreme zooming feature (and lack thereof) on product images made it difficult to view nutritional information of the products.
SHARING INSIGHTS WITH HARMONY CRICKET FARM
My solutions focused on three primary concepts:
Ease of Product Selection: Upon product selection increases, improve product selection by increasing flexibility and user-freedom by providing more filtering options. Improve consumer confidence at checkout by providing more details on additional costs early in the product selection process.
Visibility: Improve consumer knowledge-confidence of company and products by breaking up text into clearly labeled and shorter sections. Make company and product-purchasing locations more intuitive to users by providing this information clearly labeled on the home, shop, and about pages.
Readability: Improve accessibility of product information to users by including a sliding-scale style zooming feature on all product images.
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