Flock
Website Redesign
August 2024
Flock is a modern, fast-casual restaurant known for its inviting atmosphere and unique menu. This redesign aimed to enhance the website’s usability by addressing three key issues: cluttered layout, difficult navigation, and challenging event calendar maintenance.
Design Process
Using a human-centered design approach, the site redesign commenced through the steps of Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation, and Measurement.
Inspiration
Understanding the problem
Despite its popularity, Flock’s previous website suffered from:
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A cluttered layout that overwhelmed users and made it difficult to find key information.
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Poor navigation structure, leading to confusion and drop-offs.
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A complex event calendar system that was hard for staff to update and maintain.
Previous Site
Home
About
Contact
Events
Research & Insights
To better understand the pain points and opportunities, I conducted:
User Interviews: Spoke with 5 customers who frequently visited the business or ordered online and 3 staff members who maintained the event calendar.
Competitive Analysis: Reviewed the websites of top competitors to identify trends and best practices.
Analytics Review: Examined website data to pinpoint where users were dropping off.
Key Findings
Users struggled to locate menu items and event details due to visual clutter.
The navigation structure was unintuitive, making it difficult for users to freely move across the site.
Staff found the event calendar system cumbersome, leading to outdated or missing event details.
Competitors utilized strong imagery and social proof/customer reviews.
Ideation
Designing the Solution
Based on research insights, I focused on three key areas:
Decluttering the layout: Streamlined the homepage and category pages for a cleaner, more digestible experience.
Improving navigation: Implemented a logical menu hierarchy with clear labels and a persistent navigation bar.
Simplifying event calendar maintenance: Integrated a user-friendly CMS for effortless event updates.
The decision was made to transition from Wix to SquareSpace to meet the maintenance goals of the management team and have an easy-to-update event calendar.
Initial concepts were sketched, made into high-fidelity wireframes, and presented to the Flock team for feedback. Minor revisions were noted and made.
Sketches
High-Fidelity Wireframes
Home
About
Implementation
Development
Designs were built out as pages on Squarespace. The launch included transitioning the domain to SquareSpace and setting up additional redirects.
Usability Testing
To ensure goals were met, usability tests were conducted with 6 participants to:
- Confirm users can easily find key restaurant details.
- Verify that the new navigation structure improves website flow and usability.
- Test the event calendar management system to confirm that staff can quickly and effortlessly update events.
Testing Results:
- All testers were able to find content such as menus, ordering, and booking events.
- Testers were able to navigate through the site without having to use the back button.
- Staff members could add events to the calendar and make changes without issue.
Impact
Post-launch, the team used key performance indicators (KPIs) such as bounce rates, average session duration, and the number of online reservations to measure success.
Since launch, the site saw:
- A 30% reduction in bounce rate.
- Simplified event management, enabling staff to update the calendar in under 2 minutes.
- A 50% increase in event inquiries
- Increased engagement, with users spending an average of 1.5 minutes longer on the site per session.
Analytic Snapshot
Reflection & Next Steps
This project reinforced the importance of streamlined layouts, intuitive navigation, and easy-to-maintain backend systems in restaurant websites.
Future improvements may include personalized event recommendations and a seamless RSVP system to enhance event participation.