Project: Online Store for nuts and dry fruits

Client: Nuts Arabia

Client Overview

NutsArabia offers all varieties of nuts keeping the distinct tastes, flavors, textures, and aromas of each type of nut.

My Role

Stakeholders of this project were 2 Designers, Business Analysts, 4 Developers, Project Mangers and ADM Head. My role was to identify the pain points of the existing users and design an unique experience.

Problem

Online food stores are a highly competitive market. The user demographic were from the middle east and with the rise of online stores like amazon and noon, nuts arabia was losing its customer base.

Approach

Although our brief was to develop better functionality than our client's competitors, we stressed that engaging in a feature parity war was neither strategic, nor had the best interests of the existing users at heart.

To differentiate ourselves in an already mature and competitive market, we needed to define a desirable role for the app and how it would meet the needs of the existing users. We were thrilled by the opportunity to create something more meaningful.

Lean Approach

We opted for a lean approach which emphasised rapid sketching, prototyping, user feedback and design mockups. This created early team‐wide alignment, sparked tons of great ideas and created a strong sense of ownership across different disciplines within my organisation.

Starting on the same page

Meeting with key stakeholders helped us to understand their business challenges. Together we identified risks and aligned on expectations and constructed a shared vision for the app.

Sharing our methods and thinking from the outset helped to build a strong client relationship. Ample opportunities for input at all stages of the project built trust and created a comfortable environment to share ideas.

The Discovery

The discovery phase was a quick, high‐intensity effort that allowed us to define project milestones, audit the existing work, review the competitor landscape, understand our client's vision, and begin research into user needs, behaviours and pain‐points. We also kicked off a technical discovery phase to understand feasibility and constraints.

We used personas constantly throughout the project to guide design decisions, priorities, and create empathy amongst the client and our team. Our persona hypothesis consisted of five different archetypes which we used to facilitate discussions about our users needs, desires and varying contexts of use. These variables could be categorised based on their eating habits, how they consume, product awareness and their reason to visit the website.

Our research revealed that the concept of Raw nuts represented something different to health motivated customers. Users' motivations for purchasing from the website differed, hinting at different requirements. From the existing website we noticed a lot of cart abandonment