Blendees is a black-owned juice and smoothie bar that started in 2011 as a fundraiser for a football team. From its growing success, Blendees became a business with a mission to “drink healthy and be healthy.” They believe that shopping healthy shouldn’t be expensive. Their customizable menu includes smoothies, tea, acai, and all things natural to maximize health benefits.
Jodie Li : UX Researcher
Nicolette Shin : UX Designer + Marketing Strategist
Tracy Nguyen : Visual Designer
Rou Wen : Web Builder + Visual Designer
Adrian Rodriguez Valdez : Marketing + Content Strategist
<aside> 💡 Mentors: Lavanya Kumar, Marci Garcia, Tarrea Tolbert
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Though business is strong, a lacking online presence and no way of tracking business metrics left Blendees with little room for customer expansion
We envisioned that Blendees’ new website design and social media branding will expand their customer base by creating a cohesive experience that showcases Blendees’ core mission of creating quality healthy food with affordability, while highlighting Blendee’s culture of welcomeness and inclusivity.
In 10 weeks, we created a brand new website, implemented an online ordering system, and produced a marketing plan for Blendees.
In our 10 week partnership with Blendees, we sought to build a focused online presence through facilitating customer engagement.
So went about the creation of a new website + a new online ordering system & a SEO-focused marketing campaign
In our initial meeting with Blendees’ stakeholders, their primary wish was to have a website redesign and a new marketing plan with the overall goal to expand the customer base. Creative freedom was heavily encouraged.
Without clear identification of the problem space, our team took it upon ourselves to research and explore the needs of both the business and the users.
First, we conducted a mad lib activity with the stakeholders:
<aside> 📎 We are a company that has always wanted to create drinks that are good and healthy. We are successful today because perfected making smoothies that are customized for our customers. But this is the beginning of our next chapter. And to thrive in a world where reaching customers is the biggest challenge, we need to achieve more customer engagement, more ways to communicate our “why” to the customer. The choices we make and the work we do together will be in service of just that. We are endlessly willing, passionate, striving and that is why we will succeed.
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From we mad lib activity, we narrowed down our scope of focus and refined the mission statement of Blendees to the following:
"Create quality blends where the maximum health benefits can be achieved through drinking your fruits, veggies, and roots"
Based on our understanding of Business needs, we created our How Might We's:
How might we revamp the website and marketing campaign such that Blendees can expand their customer base and stand out from its competitors?
How might we create an engaging experience for Blendees customers while conveying Blendees’ mission?
After narrowing down the business goal, we conducted secondary research and user research to understand the design opportunities based on user needs and business needs.
We began the research process with oberservation of current website by analyzing the current structure of blendees’ original website, and found notable need for change in terms of website structure:
Website audit
We wanted to know what users thought about the website, so we sent out surveys to gain more insights. From our user survey for non Blendees customers, we garnered 13 responses in which helped provide us with validation and new ideas:
Questions Asked: