Mau Loa Sweets
Custom Decorated Cookies
What is Mau Loa Sweets?
Mau Loa Sweets is a small cookie business located in Andover, MN. Owner and entrepreneur, Kristin, started the business out of her home in 2019 with goals in mind to: offer tasty treats for events; source responsible ingredients; and offer dietary options for those with food restrictions.
What’s the problem?
Mau Loa Sweet’s owner was interested in the overall usability of her website, with a goal of attracting and informing potential clients and customers. In doing so, she wanted to encourage custom cookie orders, holiday pre-sales, and sign-ups for cookie decorating classes.
The Challenge
Improving website usability
My Role
Primary Role: UX Researcher
Heuristic Analysis
Usability Testing
Current Website Homepage
Starting out…
A heuristic evaluation was completed to inform missing elements of usability best practices. The primary method used to determine overall navigation of the website was a virtual moderated usability test. To maintain reliability across sessions, a usability research plan was developed to guide the welcome script, scenarios/tasks, and follow up questions. The tasks and questions in the research plan were meticulously generated to inform the research goal and objectives.
Objectives:
Identify strengths and weaknesses of the website design to attract and inform clients
Assess navigation ease of the website
Identify pain points
A total of eight participants were recruited; five participants were self-sourced by researchers and three participants were sourced by Prime Digital Academy. The self-sourced participants engaged in a virtual moderated usability test with at least one researcher, while three participants engaged in a virtual group moderated usability test with one researcher, one notetaker/observer, and a tech person (ensured session was being recorded, links were enabled for the user to click on). Each session was recorded and lasted approximately 30 minutes.
Usability Research Plan Task/Scenario Examples
“Now you’re thinking you’d like some specially prepared, graduation-themed cookies for your grad party. Please show me how you would place an order for these special, themed cookies from Mau Loa Sweet’s website.”
“Imagine someone shared this company’s website with you.
What do you think is the main purpose or focus of this website?”
Moderated Usability Test
What we did with the data…
Data from the usability tests were combined in a group repository and later clustered utilizing an affinity diagram. Clusters were defined by task/scenario and noted relevant pain points, common issues/problems and important quotes reported by the users.
Figjam Group Synthesis
Findings/Recommendations:
Visibility of text on website is inconsistent (contrast is poor)
make all primary text black or a darker color
Clickable buttons are confusing when grayed out
shape them (i.e., oval/pill shape versus rectangle) and fill in with blue color
Homepage is too wordy and long
add new tab (i.e., About page) to homepage to break up sections
Combine “Shop Pre-Sale” and “Request Custom Cookies” into one page
suggested tab name “Buy Cookies”
Clarity of product unclear
clearly state that cookies are sold (sweet treats is confusing)
Recommendations Cont’d:
Use common/familiar words throughout website so the user isn’t questioning it
e.g., mood board (6 out of 8 participants didn’t know what this was) and they did not want to go into the FAQ to figure it out
Be concise in what you are trying to convey
if pictures can convey what words are saying, use pictures to break it up
Make sure pages aren’t too long
users lose patience when there’s too much scrolling they have to do
Change “event” to “classes” to promote cookie decorating classes