The Challenge

Harmony Cricket Farms is a food producer dedicated to making crave-worthy, gluten free, sustainable, and healthy foods powered by cricket protein flour. Owners and stakeholders are looking to have the site reviewed to gain insights on how well its user experience matches consumer expectations.

The solution

Conduct several usability reviews of the existing Harmony Cricket Farm website to identify success areas, pain points, and areas of opportunity for the company. This will set them up for success prior to their expansion. 

Context Clues:

Cricket macros

According to the Harmony Cricket Farms website crickets contain more protein per gram than beef, as much calcium as milk, and more than 100% of your recommended daily intake of vitamin B12 per serving. Cricket flour can be used in savory recipes, smoothies, and baked goods. They’re everywhere!

Getting over the ick factor

When I first got the brief I was immediately put off by the nature of the product. Crickets and food are not something I’ve willingly put together, however I knew crickets were being consumed as food. I just wasn’t aware of the fact that you could consume cricket products without interacting with actual crickets. Cricket flour is already accessible because it resembles a product we use everyday. The ick factor is truly just in your mind, and I’m not one to turn down a chocolate chip cookie, chirping or not.

To market, to market

This leads me to the brilliance of their marketing strategy. Bear with me here: Harmony Cricket Farms is looking to expand and allow buyers to purchase their products wholesale to sell in their stores. Their primary user group is now also going to include people in charge of stocking local businesses everywhere. This means that the people doing the marketing will be retail employees of those businesses, upselling or presenting the product to their customers. Health conscious grocery stores, coffee shops, etc, will already be filled with people who are either curious about the product or fully aware of its benefits. The ick factor is now not a factor at all.

“Where do crickets come from?”

Cricket flour is made via freeze drying crickets, baking them and grinding them up into a powder. Now you know.

 Methods

• Heuristic based usability review

• Remote usability testing

• Raw data input and sorting

• Findings and recommendations report

Tools

• Zoom

• Slack

• Trello

• Sketch

• Keynote

• Pages

Caffeine

• I tried to limit my caffeine intake (how much money I spent on Starbucks) this week and it did not serve me well.

Heuristic based usability review

In order to familiarize myself with the product I conducted a preliminary heuristic based usability review using Shneiderman’s 8 Golden Rules of usability design. The main purpose of this was to identify pain points and possible areas of focus for our remote usability testing sessions with participants within the client’s user group. 

Remote usability test script

After our individual heuristic analysis, myself and a small design team worked together to create a script to conduct usability testing sessions with participants.This ensures a level playing field for all of the sessions and allows us to get quantitative and qualitative information about the site. I created a version for moderators and a version for note taking. The research goals of the script inform the tasks we have participants run through while they share their screen with us.

Research Goals

•  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

Raw data input and synthesis

We get so many amazing pieces of information and feedback from all the participants that note taking becomes imperative to the process. The design team used Trello to input and sort through our raw data.

Findings and recommendations report

Based in my findings from our usability sessions I created a presentation with key findings and recommendations for them. Here are some key slides from the presentation.

I also created a brand new FAQ page for them. All of our participants suggested it would be a good idea for them to have one, since they would immediately know to go there for all of their questions, I thought this was a brilliant idea, especially since all of them had very similar questions. Another standout recommendation (see left picture) is expanding their product section inside the homepage with easily scannable key information about each product, the previous one contained some dead links to an old site and had virtually no product information.