Case Study: E-Commerce — Feinkost Dalmatino
My second project as an aspiring UX/UI Designer was about creating an e-commerce shop for a local shop or professional. For this project, my group members and I decided to go with “Feinkost Dalmatino”, a Berlin based shop for croatian delicatessen.
About Feinkost Dalmatino
The idea of Feinkost Dalmatino is to bring a piece of croatia to Berlin — and this for almost 20 years now. Their motto is: “A piece of home, a piece of vacation, a piece of childhood memory”. The Dalmatino is a small business run in the family circle, typically southern. So come shopping with them, it is not uncommon to chat so much that customers completely forget the time.
To wrap it up: It’s all about high quality croatian products and personal connection between the shop and their customers.
How we started off
In the empathizing phase of our project, we did some secondary research. We gathered some interesting facts about croatia as a country itself. Some main insights were:
- Flos Olei (a product that Feinkost Dalmatino is selling) is the world’s most reputable olive oil guide declared Istria as the best olive oil region on the planet
- Croatia now boasts 7 Michelin stars with more eateries being considered for the exclusive foodie guide each year. That’s twice as many as Greece which has one of the most legendary cuisines in the world
- all 21 counties in Croatia are GMO-free
- Croatia is one of the official representatives of the Mediterranian Diet which is on the list of UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage of humanity
Another source were comments of Dalmatino’s customers on the internet. Just to mention two of them:
- “Despite the tense parking situation, I really enjoy shopping in Dalmatino. Very friendly service. Dalmatino has a Croatian
culture of drinking and eating. We can say that Dalmatino is similar to the Croatian stand at Green Week. My connection
(as a small message) with Croatia!” - “Owner is very friendly, great selection”
Others also write about the good quality of the products and the friendly service. All this data is showing that Feinkost Dalmatino is very successful in transmitting an authentic taste and feeling of croatia, with the help of high quality products and a very personal and friendly service. The main describing adjectives were “Fresh, sophisticated, affordable, little home and friendly”.
The next step was a business & competitive analysis. For our primary research got in touch with the owner of the shop and did a stakeholder interview. We found out that the business goals were matching the insights we found in the previous research. We managed to create a shared understanding of business objectives and took a look at current and potential competitors. These were for example all kinds of balkan shops, but also several shops for delicatessen and shops like “Frischeparadies” in Berlin — just to mention a few.
Feinkost Dalmatino has already a website where you find information about the shop itself, some photos of a few products, contact information and delivery information. Dalmatino offers a delivery service to its customers, but for this you have to call them on the phone and order — this means you need to know already the products. There is no actual e-commerce shop yet.
Here we found a design opportunity:
“Create a service where a person can order everything easily online and specify the time when and where.”
This is why we decided to create an e-commerce shop from scretch.
Define & Ideation
In the define phase of our project, we first created a sitemap to list all the pages and show the hierarchy, structure and the content of earch page of the e-commerce shop.
Our problem statement was pretty clear after that. We needed to find a way, that people of all ages, who want to buy croatian delicatessen, can navigate through the website and order products for delivery in an uncomplicated and quick way.
We had to ask ourselves in the ideation phase: How do we turn our learnings into an opportunity for design? So we finally decided in this process to concentrate on the possibility of selecting a product and adding it to the shopping cart.
In our previous research we found out, that “gift sets” (a basket of mixed products, e.g. sausages, wine, cheese and olive oil) are one of the main things to buy at Dalmatino. So we decided to work on a user flow, where a person is guiding through the website to buy a gift set.
Prototyping
Starting off with low-fidelity wireframing through just sketching the main screens for our user flow, we quickly went from paper to digital and created mid-fidelity wireframes.
At this point, we did usability testing with a few people. This gave us some very useful and interesting insights. Some interactions that we had created didn’t make sense in the users perspective, so we did some changes and developed our mid-fidelity prototype again.
You can see the result here:
Now starts the really juicy part of this project. We needed to think about Branding, so we needed to ask:
WHO is Feinkost Dalmatino? We wanted to depict the warmth, safety, friendlyness in the shop and the affordable quality products you can get there. We finally went with this attributes for brand attributes:
Feinkost Dalmatino is…
… extra-ordinary
… trustworthy
… friendly
and never…
mediocre
Its time for COLORS! :)
To give our e-commerce shop some spice, we went on with a moodboard and colors — having the brand attributes in mind. We got inspired by related colors to the country, for example turquoise for the ocean water. It is also a color to represent the trustworthyness and friendliness. For our moodboard we got inspired by similar shops and food blogs.
Bring it all together
After a long process of choosing colors, typography and pictures, we could bring it all together in our high-fidelity wireframe, our final prototype. We wanted to keep it as simple as possible and not overwhelming with too many colors, we went for turquoise as our primary color and added some variations of that. Et voila, here it is:
I am just showing a few screens, to give an idea of our e-commerce shop and how the final result looks like.
To remind again of our user flow: a easy and quick navigation thought the website, to order a gift set (of wine, cheese, olive oil and kulen (spicy saw croatian sausage). For this you would navigate from the homepage to the produtct groups (product categories and gift sets), to the gift set 1. If you select, you would find the a page with all the information and pictures of that particular gift set.
We added some nice features like start rating (and some additional comments from customers about their experiences and evaluations), the option to write a greeting card and with a click on the hyperlink of the listed items, you would find more detailed information about the single products in the set. For this we added a pop up window as you can see on the last picture.
Some feedback to our final result was, that people really liked the indication of the products region, shown by pictures under the description.
I can say for sure:
This was a very fun project and i am happy to share our process here. Thanks a lot to my team of Suzane Castro, Kateryna Makarova and Vedran Lešnjak!
I hope you enjoyed reading and leave a comment if you like:)
