REALITY
KITCHEN
Reality Kitchen is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing employment path experiences that nourish and inspire all learners, with and without disabilities. They serve delicious food while fostering personal and professional growth through supportive resources in an inclusive community setting.

The goal of this project was to redesign their website to improve the user experience and ensure customers, donors, and individuals seeking employment could easily find what they need.
TIMEFRAME
7 WEEKS
TEAM
ALLISON AUSTAD
AUSTEN COURPET
NIKITA WAGENMAN
TOOLS
CANVA, FIGJAM, FIGMA,
GOOGLE SUITE, PHOTOSHOP
TRELLO, WORDPRESS, ZOOM
THE PROBLEM

The Reality Kitchen website functions as a central hub for store information, an access point for online classes, and a platform for community outreach.

However, our usability testing and research revealed that users found the original website challenging to navigate and the Reality Kitchen mission unclear. They had difficulty grasping the organization's purpose and struggled to locate the information they needed.

OUR SOLUTION

Redesign the website using the design process (discover, define, develop, deliver) to ensure intuitive navigation, foster a sense of community, simplify maintenance, and boost monthly donations?

THE DESIGN PROCESS
DISCOVER
01
  • Interviews
  • Survey
  • Heuristic Evaluation
02
DEFINE
  • User Persona
  • Empathy Map
  • User Journey Map
03
DEVELOP
  • Feature Prioritization
  • Card Sorting
  • Wireframes & LoFi Prototype
  • Style Guide
04
DELIVER
  • User Testing
  • Iterations
  • Hi-fi prototyping
05
REFLECT
  • Challenges
  • What we learned
  • Future Work
01

DISCOVER

USER RESEARCH
To begin, we needed to determine:

  • What do users really want from the website?
  • What is the current Reality Kitchen website doing right?
  • What could be improved?
INTERVIEW
Interviewed the founder of Reality Kitchen to gain a thorough understanding of what they were looking for from the redesign.
USER TESTS
Conducted 13 user tests of the original Reality Kitchen website to discover what worked and what didn't.
HEURISTIC EVALUATION
Performed a heuristic evaluation to evaluate the original website to determine what keeps users from finding the information they are looking for.
USER TEST TAKEAWAYS

After conducting users tests of the original websites, we found users noticed the following:
CONFUSING NAVIGATION
The website was difficult to navigate as heading labels were misleading and would often direct users to other websites without warning.
UNCLEAR
MISSION
Users were unable to gather what the organization's mission is from the copy presented on the website.
LACKING
INFORMATION
Users were unable to complete tasks the website was created for such as see what is on the menu and place orders from the wholesale bakery due to a lack of information.
HEURISTIC EVALUATION
We evaluated the website and found the following areas for improvement:

  • Inconsistency. Lack of consistent text, color, header, and button usage. Design and navigation changes from page to page.
  • Too much text. The amount of text and lack of hierarchy is overwhelming making it difficult to read.
  • Broken pages. Many pages are missing/ links are broken.
HOME PAGE BEFORE RE-DESIGN
HOME PAGE AFTER RE-DESIGN
02

DEFINE

To define the problem and focus the development phase, we completed the following:

  • Created a user persona to highlight typical website user goals and pain points.

  • Crafted a user journey map to determine design opportunities.
USER PERSONA: LUCY
Lucy is a retired senior who enjoys visiting the cafe to buy food, drinks, and wholesale baked goods. She also likes to donate to causes she cares about.

While she's eager to support local businesses, Lucy isn't very tech-savvy and needs a simple, straightforward way to find cafe hours, menus, events, and wholesale options. If the process is too complicated, she might give up.


LUCY LUNCH
Age: 67
Work: Retired Teacher
Family: Married
Location: Eugene, Oregon
GOALS:
  • To find the Reality Kitchen café menu so she can discover what food and drink they sell.
  • To find the the Reality Kitchen café hours and location.
  • To feel like a part of something bigger than herself by making a donation and supporting a deserving organization.

FRUSTRATIONS:
  • When a website is inaccessible and hard to use (she is not very tech-savvy.)
  • She will give up if she finds a task too confusing.
USER JOURNEY MAP
UX SCENARIO
Lucy, a retired school teacher, wants to meet up with her friends at a local eatery. She’s been to Reality Kitchen before and likes supporting a business that aligns with her values.

She visits the website to find out when they are open. She also needs to check the menu for allergens because one of her friends is gluten free.
GOALS
  • Meet up & eat with friends
  • Support a good cause
NEEDS
  • Hours & Menu Visibility
  • Consumer Confidence
DISCOVERY
Searches for a good brunch spot for her and her friends.
Remembers having a good brunch at Reality Kitchen.
1
2
RESEARCH
Remembers Reality Kitchen is not open every day.
Visits their websites and is surprised by how easy it is to use and find what she is looking for.
3
4
TRY
Lucy navigates through the site and is very impressed by the organization and professionalism.
She easily locates the cafe menu and is able to find the gluten free selections.
5
6
RETAIN
Lucy learns more about Reality Kitchen's mission and valuesthrough the website.
Lucy feels compelled to make a donation in addition to choosing to go there for brunch with her friends.
7
8
03

DEVELOP

For this phase, we:

  • Performed card sorting and created a site map to determine navigation.

  • Crafted a feature prioritization matrix to decide on website features.

  • Created a style tile and iterated on our design ideas to ensure consistency and brand standards.
CARD SORTING
We performed card sorting to organize the necessary elements of the website:
  • ABOUT
    • History & Mission
    • Our Mission
    • Board of Directors
  • PROGRAMS
    • In-Person Skills Training
    • Online Rural Initiative
  • MENU
    • Cafe & Bakery
    • Pretzel Wagon
  • SHOP
    • General Store
    • Wholesale Bakery
  • GET INVOLVED
    • Donate
    • Food Insecurity Initiative
    • Join The Team
  • FOOTER
    • Location/ Address
    • Hours
    • Contact Us
    • Social Links
    • Accessibility
FEATURE PRIORITIZATION
We created a feature prioritization matrix to decide which features we wanted to focus on. It resulted in the decision to prioritize these features:
SEPARATE SPACE
FOR UPDATES
Because updates were crowding the home page and making it hard to find important information, we wanted to prioritize making a separate space for blog posts so that needed information could be easily found.
PHOTOS AND TESTIMONIALS
Users want to feel connected to the organization. Therefore, we decided to prioritize the inclusion of photos and testimonials to help the user relate to the organization.
EASY TO NAVIGATE
In user tests of the current website, participant's biggest concern was that it was too difficult to navigate and they expressed it was one of the biggest hinderances to getting involved.
STYLE GUIDE
We wanted to establish a brand that is cozy and welcoming for our users. To this end, we created the following style guide:

04

DELIVER

To gain feedback and iterate on our existing design, we did the following:

  • User Testing

  • Iterations

  • Hi-fi Prototyping
FINAL PROTOTYPE
https://www.realitykitchen.org/
Made on
Tilda