Happy Gardens of Austin

CLIENT: Happy Gardens of Austin
TEAM: Lauren Weinmeister, Zoe Calish, Casey Wood, Fernando Fernandez
ROLE: Co-UX Designer/Researcher
GOAL: Redesign Happy Gardens of Austin’s website to so users have a better understanding of the company offerings and process
YEAR: 2022
TIME: 3 weeks
TOOLS: Figma, Zeplin, Google Sheets, Toggle

Who is Happy Gardens of Austin?
Happy Gardens of Austin is a landscape design company that is based in Austin, Texas and works to design sustainable and environmentally friendly designs that will thrive in the region. Every project is designed custom to the clients needs in an effort to create an outdoor space that brings the clients happiness at their own home.

Research at the Beginning:
To begin, we interviewed our client, Hanna Bass, and learned about the problems she was facing with her website. She expressed that many clients that come from her website are not understanding her company offerings and her process. This meant that with every new consultation call she was finding herself explaining her services to clients and was unable to spend more time learning about what it was that the clients wanted out of the project she would be creating for them. After gathering this information, it was important moving forward that we sought out to understand why this was a recurring issue.

Research Methods:
Client interview
Google Analytics evaluation
Heuristics evaluation
Usability testing of current website (4 tests)
Competitive Analysis

Hueristics Evaluation:
The inital findings showed that there was a lot of confusion for users around booking a consultation as there were 4 different call to actions on the home page alone. Users were unsure of which one was the "right" one to use.

The other finding we found was that the website shows a large list of "our services" when in fact the only service being provided is landscape design, not full landscape of clients properties.

Comparative Analysis:
By looking at local and national competitors we found that while the website for Happy Gardens of Austin did have features like booking a consultation, explaining design process, and work samples. It was clear that these other sites were doing it much more effectively. There was also a handful of other features that our site lacked all together that all others had and did well.

User Testing of Originial Website:
After understanding the issues the of the website we created a hypothesis and then dove into user testing. We created a test script and had 4 users perform various tests on the original Happy Gardens of Austin website. Some of the key quotes from our users are shown below.

1. Tell me about what you think this business/site offers?
2. How credible/trustworthy does this site feel?
3. Show me how you would go about scheduling a consultation.
4. Explain the landscape design process.
5. What is Happy Gardens of Austin?

Persona:
After synthesizing the research, we developed Johnny Appleseed.

Design & Ideation:
We began the design process by creating lo-fiedelity wireframes of what we envisioned the website to look like with the redesign. We tested a lo-fidelity prototype and found that with the new design users were already able to more accurately describe what Happy Gardens of Austin offered. This assured us that we were headign in the right direction as we moved forward with more hi-fidelity mock-ups.

We then created a style guide to follow before moving onto the high fidelity mockups. The color pallete we used was inspired by the Happy Gardens of Austin logo.

We showed the hi-fidelity wireframes to our client and while she liked the overall design, she had some issues with the hero image we chose for the home page and she felt the colors were too warm. Before making any changes, we wanted to test the hi-fidelity prototype and see what users had to say.

Prototype:

Learnings:
We tested our hi-fidelity prototype on 6 users -

4 of 6 users accurately described that Happy Gardens of Austin was a landscape design company
Users were able to show their understanding of the design process
Users were able to find the call to action and book a consultation easily and without confusion
Users enjoyed the warm colors used on the website and felt the colors reminded them of plants/the outdoors
Users enjoyed getting to see actually work from our client rather than stock photos of well done landscape

Next Steps:
After presenting our final design and key findings to our client we made a few recommendations -

Continue to build out more case study pages on the portfolio page
Connect clients Instagram to website (and website to Instagram)
Add more design renderings/blueprints to site to show work
Add more pictures of clients projects in phases
Develop pricing packages for users to be able to see more of the costs upfront.