La Tiendita

Context

The goal of this UX/UI project was to create an e-shop for a small business in Berlin. The task was given by Ironhack Bootcamp, but the collaboration has been real with the shop owner. We worked in a team of three. Together we conducted the UX part of the project and worked on the UI concept for the app on my own.

La Tiendita is a recently opened Mexican grocery shop located in Kreuzberg, Berlin. Being a small and new store, it realizes the importance of having an online presence to reach more customers. Although it cannot match the prices offered by larger online stores, La Tiendita wants to create a strong online impact that encourages people in Berlin to visit its physical store, but also to offer the chance to shop online.

The Product

Our aim was to design a website for La Tiendita with two main objectives. Firstly, we wanted to build an e-commerce platform that enables the sale of products online. Secondly, we aimed to showcase the store’s specials such as Mezcales, fresh tortillas, and vegetables to attract customers to the physical store.

We have put a lot of emphasis on attracting customers to the physical store by creating compelling call-to-actions and relevant content on our website’s homepage. Our goal was to avoid the typical e-commerce look and convey the message that visiting the physical store is a worthwhile experience.

How?

By conducting research and business analysis, we identified the needs of both the users and our clients. The most important aspect was to define the uniqueness of La Tiendita so that we could gather some attributes that would attract users to visit the store. For this, on the home site we placed a big map with the stores location, we also place a call to action to check weekly fresh products offered in the shop and we also added information about the store offering mezcal tasting. Apart of this, when buying online, the products are offered a bit cheaper if the client choose “Click & collect” option.

Our job has been to create a website that encourage clients to participate in the real experience of going to the store while also making it easy to purchase products by offering the option of click and collect.

Take aways

Through working with an actual client, I gained insight into the difficulty of matching user needs with business objectives. This particular project had a significant marketing component, so not only was interface design crucial but so was the UX copy content. The way the text is written and presented on the website can dramatically impact how users navigate the site.

We did concentrate a lot on the UX research and develope a solution concept. However did not have enough time to go throgh the whole proccess of wireframes and usability testing. As a result, some important steps in UX/UI development were skipped to present a Hi-Fi prototype to the client. Skipping the usability test on mid-fi prototypes resulted in creating a UI that would likely need significant changes after concept and usability testing. An early iteration would have been more effective.

It has been interesting to learn that even that an e-commerce platform isn’t simply a “template,” but rather has unique attributes and needs that must be met to successfully design a product that meets the user’s needs.