Who is Small But Mighty?
A curated small-batch coffee roastery based in Chicago that sources from a wide variety of origins. What makes their business model unique is that coffees are released on a monthly basis - and will never be released again once they're sold out.
Details
Project Type: Product Research & Site redesign
Timeline: 3-week Design Sprint
Role: UX Designer (Research, Content Design, Content Writing), Usability Testing
Tools Used: Figma, Miro, G-Suite, Notion
Overview
Background: This client project focused on creating a new shopping experience for customers and needed some research and validation to ensure the product offering satisfied customer needs.
Project goals: The main goal for this project was to increase customer retention, design a site that gave a more immersive experience for third-wave coffee drinkers, and research the business' target demographics.
Assumptions:
• Unclear demographics
• Customers are apprehensive about buying coffee online
• Users are seeking more of a variety
• Potential customers already have strong brand loyalty
🔎Research
Market analysis
It was important to look at the current landscape of the competition in the third-wave coffee industry.
We separated our analysis between large, nationally-known brands and ones based in the Chicago area.
We wanted to gauge our competitors approach to business models, target audiences, notable quotes on their sites, pricing, UX writing, and storytelling.
Most of the messaging between brands pertained to craftsmanship, education, and sustainability.
In addition to these brands, we also looked at coffee roasters based in Chicago. Similar to more prominent brands, these brands also showcased sourcing ties and the people involved in the processing of their beans.
These findings gave us a good baseline for how certain brands are positioning themselves in the market and what solutions they are providing on a digital level for their customers.
Surveys
After uncovering our market competitors, we moved onto discovering who our users would be. We created a survey to generate quantitative and qualitative data.
Our main goal was to find out how often they interacted with whole bean coffee brands and the feeling towards them.
• Almost half of our respondents were between the ages of 25-34.
• 25% of our replies were also from coffee drinkers 55 and older.
• Across all age ranges, 87% of respondents drank coffee daily.
• Also, roughly 40% of all respondents tried new coffee brands nearly every month.
User interviews
After the marketing analysis, we reviewed our surveys that validated those findings. We began to recruit interviewees in the age ranges of 25-34 and 55+. These age ranges proved to be the most significant areas of opportunity to expand when it came to driving new customers to the site, especially the 25-34 age range.
We leveraged these interviews to gather qualitative information on both age ranges to understand their behaviors and emotions better.
Key insights
Some of the key insights from those interviews and surveys were that people wanted a high-quality product, they wanted an educational experience, they wanted their roaster to be transparent, and they wanted an authentic experience. Everything started to align with what our target audience wanted and what our competitors were already offering.
📚Define
A retrospective journey
We decided to prioritize someone like Jordan (the younger persona). It was vital for us to understand that she is the largest part of the consumer base. She is less rigid with her purchasing habits, spends more money on coffee products, and is more inclined to see these products, offering an elevated or educational experience. This persona aligned with Small But Mighty’s business goals when connecting with consumers.
💭Ideation
Using natural and descriptive language
Going into our content strategy, I decided to do some content analysis and audit the business' current site. From contextual inquiries, we could tell there was an issue with what the company was trying to convey and what its users wanted.
So, I took it upon myself to do a microcopy canvas to better connect to the experience our users wanted and increase retention.
📐Design
Sticking to simple solutions
Before we started our sketching, we wanted to keep in mind what our users wanted the most through our research while still preserving our business’ need to fulfill pre-orders. We wanted to focus on these three features while designing the layout:
1. Highlighting that our products are limited run and exclusive for avid coffee drinkers, they are more enticed to purchase them.
2. Show transparency about our ethical stances for socially conscious consumers so that they justify spending more than they typically would on a coffee product.
3. Highlight craftsmanship and different brewing methods of our products so that all users can craft a “luxury” experience.
Connection to sourcing
First Iteration
Final Iteration
During our contextual inquiries, many users were looking to understand the business right off the bat. The content has changed to a brief intro of the brand, highlighting craftsmanship and elevating the customer experience.
An immersive product page
First Iteration
Final Iteration
As the customer enters the product page, they are presented with an intro to the product via a brief recap and data to the right of the screen about variety, flavor, elevation, and brewing suggestions.
These two design decisions were consistent findings through surveys, interviews, and contextual inquiries where users wanted to first and foremost know about the coffee flavors they were buying.
Test what we made
Next steps
• Another content iteration, specifically focusing on ethos and exclusivity.
• Encouraging our client to focus on photography for the website. We found that users are used to social media and feel a sense of connectedness to businesses through research.
Lessons learned
The first design of the navigation bar was a complete failure. Initially, we had every type of product that our client offered to be clickable - we assumed our clients wanted easy access. It wasn’t only until we did our usability tests that people were interested in a more simplified one for this particular product.