Improving customer experience for a neighborhood staple
Client
My role
Content strategy
Information architecture
UX
Web design
Collaborators
Jamie Sumague (photography)
Sahadi’s (photography)
Sahadi’s is a family-run business that offers groceries, catering, events, and more. After growing the shop over four generations to four NYC locations and nationwide shipping for items like their house-roasted spices and nuts, Sahadi’s wanted to optimize their web experience. Staff dreamed of streamlining the main side of their website—groceries—to make purchasing and checkout more straightforward for customers, while also making it easier to update content.
Strengthening the existing brand with consistency and delivering clear messaging were also priorities. Things as simple as prominently displaying their primary and secondary logos and establishing a digital section for their brand guide easily elevated the branding.
Sweet Gothic Serif
Archivo Narrow
Information architecture
My first tasks were inventorying the site, creating a site map, and identifying potential areas of improvement. After reviewing, I suggested some significant reorganizing of disconnected, related content and consolidating of repetitive content to make user experience more intuitive and give the content more hierarchy. Accordingly, the home page and main navigation received a major redesign in order to better guide visitors to the shop.
Home page: Before (full image)
Multiple and repetitive navigation bars
Highlights too many things without strong hierarchy or calls to action
Difficult for users to know what to click to purchase anything
Home page: After (full image)
Consolidated navigation area
~25% of the page dedicated to shopping via shop collections and favorite products
Highlights key facets of business that help drive revenue and build community
Products
After reviewing the site architecture, I took a closer look at how products were organized and what product collections existed. So that new customers can immediately learn from loyal Sahadi’s shoppers, I implemented a Favorites collection that considers what customers purchased most and which product keywords were most queried. Select product highlights are also on the Home page where they can have prime real estate.
Additional solutions included designing product collection cover images that better showcased its category, adding ways to view all collections, creating more applicable filters by which to search for products, putting breadcrumbs on product pages instead of just collection pages, including visibility of out-of-stock items, and adding product recommendations to product pages. By focusing on products and the means to find them, our hope is to expose more people to other products and thereby increase customer base and revenue.
