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Westside Organics
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The customer
WestSide Organics is a company based in Hayward, California, that specialises in the supply of fresh, organic products in the San Francisco bay area. The company mission is to help people lead a healthier life by providing fruit, vegetables and other organic products. This mission is synthesised by the company slogan ‘From the Farm to Your Door’.
The challenge
In 2001, Grapefruit built the WestSide Organics website in order to present the company and the products it supplied. The customer later added complementary functional modules that enabled shoppers to review and change their orders, and company employees to manage supplies.
Due to this uncontrolled growth rate, problems appeared related to the degree of knowledge and experience one needed in order to use the website, as well as due to inconsistencies in the graphical user interface. Under the new circumstances, daily operations performed both by customers and employees would require significant waiting times and learning of the unintuitive online applications. These inconveniences could have easily had a negative impact on the relationship between the company and its customers because one of the main promises - ease of delivery - was no longer easy to satisfy.
The solution
Grapefruit recommended a careful assessment of the interaction between customers and the WestSide Organics website, together with the identification of the company requirements regarding order and product supply management. The data collected by means of questionnaires tailored to address the needs of the various website user groups were combined with a series of observations made during live tests with real users.
The conclusions that emerged lead to the redesign of the entire process flow that involved customers, WestSide Organics as distributor, and its suppliers. These processes were performed in real time in a real environment, but their management required an online software application. When designing this workflow, Grapefruit needed to consider the limitations imposed by offline processes, the need for the users to work with a direct and easy application, but also envisage the entire range of scalability and flexibility issues that apply to the related processes. Additional effort was invested in order to make the buying and payment process as similar to the one in real life as possible so that users would find it intuitive and easy to comprehend.
Once the process flow was identified and described down to its smallest details, the next stage was implementing it in the online application. This involved creating a new website interface for www.westsideorganics.com and a new way of presenting products in order to include photographs and detailed nutritional information. The e-commerce area - the virtual shop - was integrated with the areas assigned to the presentation of the company, its employees, as well as the advantages offered by organic food in general.
The new website which was launched in the summer of 2004 presents in a transparent and realistic way the journey 'from the farm to your door', according to the WestSide Organics slogan. The new user experience is personalised, competitive and relevant, and combines customer-oriented information design with the brand's friendly and direct approach.
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- www.westsideorganics.com
- Download case study
- Website design
- Other Westside Organics project
- Corporate identity
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