Almond Restaurant
Almond blends farm-to-table culture in a vibrant, comfortable atmosphere. Almond provides seasonal & daily menus that are driven by market-fresh ingredients.
Team Members: Erika Flores & Chad Evenson
DESIGN PROCESS
We were given the task to redesign Almond Bar's website. We looked to our audience, foundational values, and mission moving forward in order to develop a modular and collaborative design process that prioritized content strategy, sketching, iterating, prototyping and branding.
We began the journey by evaluating the current website.
*Pictured (left) is the finished product of the responsive redesign.
Research: Asking The Right Questions
Who is our audience? What do they want? What activities are they performing the most and how long does it take them to get around? The first step was understanding our demographic, which was split between the Millennial and Baby Boomer generations.
However, the millennial generation is the one that was most engaged with our content (time on site), more likely to access our site on mobile, and most frustrated in finding relevant content. We believed this proved to make our content timeless, a characteristic that dramatically changed the content strategy. Thus, we needed to prioritize their behaviors and interests as primary use cases for the design decisions.
"The site is so busy. all i want to do is see what's on the menu and make a quick reservation." - Emily
Site map & site analysis
The site was further broken down and a site map was made in order to figure out the pains (according to the users) and target the most efficient way to optimize the user's experience. The goal was to make a path to information as short and efficient as possible - find the menu & make a reservation.
iterations & wireframes
The focus was now figuring out layout and content placement, and solving navigation and functionality problems in a format we can easily adjust. We began with a "mobile first" perspective to help us prioritize site elements while putting us in a good mindset for thinking about what content is most relevant to the site visitor and how the content becomes available to work on wider screens.
We started by sketching and drawing out our wireframes on paper to get our ideas flowing.
user-centered design decisions
A priority was redesigning a user experience that not only stays true to the restaurant's storytelling, but provides easy access to main CTA's (according to our users). We streamlined the site map by eliminating the landing page and added drop down menus on the new home page so that user's can make a quick choice between locations to view menus/make reservations.