Mom’s Kitchen

Role

UX Designer

Timeline

4-6 weeks

Tools Used

Figma

Able

The Problem

The Mom’s Kitchen website is lacking in cohesion, high-quality or consistent images, and is inaccessible to certain demographics.

What is Mom’s Kitchen?

Mom’s Kitchen is a popular local Korean restaurant with two locations in the Greater Toronto Area. One of its locations is in Unionville and the other location is in Ajax. It has been a popular Korean mainstay in the GTA since 2015.

Hypothesis

My hypothesis is that the restaurant would gain more customers and retain existing customers if its site was redesigned to be more intuitive and accessible. As is, the site is unintuitive and lacks cohesion. I believe the flaws in the website have actively lost the restaurant customers.

The Competitors

  1. Incheon House Korean

  2. Owl of Minerva

  3. Daldongnae BBQ

    • All restaurants are Korean restaurants in the East end of the Greater Toronto Area.

    • Some of the restaurants are franchises while other ones are independent.

    • Some of the restaurants have About Us pages and others do not.

    • A good restaurant website should include an About Us page to foster loyalty to the business.

    • A good restaurant website should include a CTA telling the user what the website is for.

    • Many of the sites were missing images of the products.

    • Many of the sites had technical issues like uncompressed images, that caused the sites to appear disjointed.

    • We can create value by creating a clearer CTA for clients.

    • We can create value by adding pictures next to a food item and an item description.

    • We can create value by considering all technical constraints.

User Interviews

I conducted interviews with five participants in January 2024 via email. All participants were located in Ontario and were in their mid to late twenties.

    • We want to evaluate what users think makes a successful restaurant website.

    • We want to evaluate if the current website design is intuitive to the participant.

    • We want to gather feedback from participants on any changes they believe would make the website more intuitive for them to use.

    • All participants mentioned the background colour negatively in some capacity.

    • 2/5 participants mentioned that the background colour hurts their eyes and/or makes it hard to look at the website for too long.

    • 2/5 of the participants were confused at the association between Korean food and bright orange.

    • 4/5 participants mentioned that consolidating the menu items into the “Main Menu” section would improve intuitiveness. 3/5 participants said they did not understand why the Main Menu button doesn’t do anything when clicked.

    • 4/5 of the participants said that they expect a “good” restaurant website to include a detailed menu with food descriptions.

    • 4/5 of the participants expect Reservation forms on restaurant websites.

    • 2/5 of the participants said that Mom’s Kitchen appeals to them as customers.

    • The 2 participants that said Mom’s Kitchen appeals to them still gave disclaimers about not caring if a restaurant is ugly.

Personas

  • Alyssa

    HR ASSOCIATE - 27 YEARS OLD

    Alyssa is a 27-year-old HR Associate living in Toronto, Canada. Alyssa loves running marathons and trying new restaurants for her foodie TikTok channel. Alyssa enjoys discovering cuisines from cultures she has never tried before. It’s her favourite part about living in a diverse city like Toronto. She is unfamiliar with most of the cultures in Toronto because she lived in Thunder Bay up until a year ago.

  • Maria

    SOFTWARE DEVELOPER - 34 YEARS OLD

    Maria is a 34-year-old Software Developer in Toronto, Canada. Maria loves volunteering at the Toronto Humane society and trying new restaurants with her husband on the weekends. Her husband isn’t a foodie so he lets her choose all the restaurants. He just wants to know what’s in the food, because he has a lot of allergies. Maria only chooses restaurants with detailed menus because of her husband’s allergies. In addition, Maria has very bad eye sight and has to wear glasses. Her eye sight has gotten more strained since she became a Software Developer because she has to stare at screens all day.

Task Flows

Lo-fi

Hi-fi

The Solution

My solution was to redesign the site to target the unintuitive areas I have identified. Those unintuitive areas include the inconsistent menu layout on the header bar, inconsistent descriptions of menu items, the oversized logo, and the inaccessible colour palette.