Usability Evaluation: Harmony Cricket Farm
challenge
Harmony Cricket Farm’s (HCF) mission is to change Americans’ perception of insects as food by introducing them to the tasty, gluten-free, nut-free solutions powered by crickets. They asked my team to evaluate their site and provide recommendations for ways to improve the experience overall, giving focus to understanding how information should be structured and categorized, what content consumers find compelling and ways to ensure easy product selection and checkout.
solution
Through usability evaluation and remote testing, my team and I identified ways in which Harmony Cricket Farm can improve the way the educational content around crickets and HCF is presented, refine the shopping experience and resolve pain points in the site structure and navigation.
My contributions included doing a usability review and working with my team to develop a testing protocol and then conducting remote moderated sessions using the think-aloud protocol with 12 interviews. Lastly, we reviewed and synthesized the data and created individual findings and recommendations reports.
methods
Usability Review
Remote Usability Testing
Affinity Diagramming
tools
Google Docs
Zoom
Otter.ai
Trello
Adobe InDesign
evaluation goals & usability testing
Focusing on the needs outlined in the brief concerning ways to improve the overall experience by determining on how information should be organized, what consumers find compelling and ways to ensure easy product selection and checkout, we landed on these three evaluation goals for our testing:
Understand what users can learn about cricket-powered food from the site
Evaluate the way in which users can acquire the product
Identify pain points in the navigation of the site
With those goals in mind, we developed a testing protocol and conducted 12 interviews via remote moderated sessions using the think-aloud protocol.
key findings
Usability tests revealed that while HCF was doing a good job with the look and feel of the website, there was significant room for growth in:
Organizing and presenting the educational information about crickets and the company
Highlighting the purpose of the business
Hierarchy of of copy content
“Where do they get the crickets? I want an FAQ.”
“I would have had no idea that they sold crickets.
I thought it was a clever farm name.”
“It’s a lot of text. I want the value to be very obvious.”
findings & recommendations report
After synthesizing our data as a team, we created individual findings & recommendations reports for HCF. The reports included key points, additional suggestions for changes, wireframes of possible solutions moving forward.
