Jeni’s Ice Cream
ECOMMERCE REDESIGNJeni’s Ice Cream is a beloved dessert brand offering ice cream crafted for true enthusiasts, featuring fewer stabilizers and more flavor. As they plan to expand their physical locations and diversify their flavor collections, they sought help to revamp their site experience, aiming to forge stronger connections with their customers.
Jeni’s Ice Cream aimed to strengthen their direct-to-consumer presence but faced challenges in conveying how delicate items like ice cream are shipped. They needed a UX strategy to develop a new cart experience optimized for shipping their products, ensuring customers feel confident in their purchase and delivery process.
In just 6 months, we designed and built a comprehensive eCommerce experience, enhancing navigation, cart-building, and brand storytelling to elevate the customer journey.
SITEjenis.com
DURATION8 months
ROLEUX Designer / UX Research
Preliminary UXR
Before diving into UX strategy, I supported the UXR team by reviewing testing videos to extract valuable insights and outcomes.
The most significant insights revolved around shipping logistics/messaging, emphasizing the safe delivery of ice cream, and the importance of educating users about the 4-pint minimum.
These findings, coupled with insights from the UXR team, instilled confidence in recommending to the client that a more robust focus on shipping during the UX phase would greatly enhance the overall user experience.
UX Phase
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The UXR phase, coupled with stakeholder interviews, illuminated many areas for site improvement.
The first action was to make shopping as easy and transparent as possible. Which was done by providing indicators on product cards, so users could easily add to the cart. Additionally, this affected the whole purchasing flow. I had to build a new custom mini cart + cart page to work around the brand’s fulfillment restrictions. Video in a below section*
Finally, one of the minor goals was to bring in the feeling of being in a physical location. So I collaborated with the UI team to bring in more shots of texture on rollover states for desktop and bring in brand value opportunities on the homepage.
Texture and Personality
In understanding user expectations, I knew the site was being visited by die-hard jeni’s fans as well as new potential customers trying to see what the brand brought to the table.
Since Jeni’s was about taste and bringing joy vs being budget-friendly or diet compliant. I decided to play up the idea of flavor and personality. Which was executed by adding more imagery of ice cream textures and brand mission moments.
The client expressed how they wanted the website to be adaptable to change. Since they were a brand that is constantly launching new products and collaborations, it needed something flexible.
During the kickoff of the development phase, I began by creating a module library with displayed the various permutations of each module.
Along with that, wrote out a quick set of annotations to describe to developers how the module would function for both the user and the administrator merchandising the module.
Final high fidelity designs created a collaborator designer
Keeping It Simple
One of the pain points of the original site was that the navigation did little to give users information about what products offered or categories were offered.
I designed the navigation to be as scannable as possible. Simple language in mega menus to launch users to product list pages where they could discover more.
Second, it was a priority to demonstrate to the user that there were more options for shopping. We elevated local delivery (via Olo) and grocery store locator into the navigation. The idea was to get users a pint of ice cream in their hands vs only offering the website as a single source.
Mini-Cart Flow
The process of shipping ice cream is very difficult, so all shoppers were limited to 4 pints minimum for their orders.
Shoppers were able to build their pint boxes seamlessly, all the while having a running tally on the top banner of the mini-cart. The UI gave the users an understanding of what is needed to move forward.
Recorded via the testing site - Not final *
