Local E-Commerce Website: Mickey Byrnes Irish Pub
Intro
Local shops and practitioners are suffering a decrease in the demand of their services and products due to the extreme situation COVID-19 pushed worldwide. This can affect local economies and many families. Alongside this, we can see true intent and a growing trend to support local businesses in many communities. We were asked to help local shops and professionals improve their online presence to be more competitive in the actual market.
Challenge
For our second Ironhack project, my partner Eric and I were challenged to design a desktop website for a local business or professional. In this project we’re focusing our efforts on organizing the information in a clear way, to be most effective for both the customer and provider. Also, we want to tackle Interaction design patterns to make the exchange as streamlined as possible.
In our case, our client already had a website. Our job was then to analyze what is already there and propose a better solution for the business’ online presence.
Selecting the Perfect Client
The day that we were assigned our groups and given this project, my partner Eric, was out of town. That did not give me a day off. As soon as we were presented with the project brief, I had the perfect client in mind…my local watering hole, Mickey Byrnes.
A little background: My friends and I have been regulars at this local pub since it opened almost 13 years ago. It has become our home away from home, where we meet up for celebrations, holidays, good days, bad days, and just any day really. It’s that bar in movies, where they know your name and pour your drink as soon as you walk in the door.
The two owners Mark and Karen have become pretty good friends of ours, so I knew that we could have access to the stakeholders and staff in order to get some really good insight into the business.
I proposed the bar to Eric, he agreed, and our journey began.
About Our Client: Mickey Byrnes Irish Pub
Mickey Byrne’s Irish Pub is located in the historic downtown of Hollywood, Florida. The Pub opened in November 2008 and their aim was to bring an authentic piece of modern Ireland to South Florida.
Of course like every great Irish Pub they offer an array of traditional Irish food dishes, great cocktails and beers and live music and entertainment.
Mickey Byrne’s is a meeting spot for locals and tourists alike. They are known for their events and sports showings.
Research
Once we decided that Mickey’ would be our client, I quickly reached out to the owner and asked him for an interview. He was responsive and agreed to meet the following week after the soccer game. Since I had direct contact with the stakeholder, and Eric lived out of state, I took responsibility of doing the interview.
Before the interview we did some research on the bar and checked out their website. I have been a regular for 12+ years and I can honestly say, I don’t remember ever visiting their site. After taking the time to analyze their site, I realized why I didn’t remember it…it wasn’t memorable. It was the basic Irish Pub site. The menu was static and outdated, it didn’t list the specials or happy hour, and there was no beer list to be found. The site put an emphasis on events, which makes sense because they drive a lot of traffic to their bar for large events and holidays.
As part of our preliminary research we put together a list of the local competition in the Hollywood, FL area. Although Mickey’s is located in Downtown Hollywood, we didn’t want to limit ourselves to those two streets. We opened our search a little further and looked into other local pubs, sports bars, Gastropubs, and “hip” bars.
Competitive Feature Analysis
Once our list of our competition was narrowed down and fine-tuned, we started working on the Competitive Feature Analysis consisting of the Brand Comparison, Feature Analysis and Market Positioning Map. These three tools would help us to find and identify gaps in the market, opportunities for our client to capitalize on, and the current and future stance of our client in comparison to it’s biggest competitors.
Mickey’s held a good place amongst its competition, as one of the leading bars in the area. With minor improvements to the website, they would easily climb to the top. They already have the loyalty amongst locals, but could easily draw in more business from young professionals and tourists.
Business Objective
Goal: Revamp existing website
Why: To create a more user-friendly and informative experience. This will drive more traffic to their site which in-turn will boost sales and increase brand awareness and reach.
Stakeholder Interview
It was a Monday night, around 7pm and I headed over to Mickey’s to meet with Mark for our interview. We took a table outside, and like the awesome host that he is, he immediately ordered us a round of drinks. We have known each other for a long time, so the conversation was easy and flowing. We caught up a bit on just general current events and the conversation naturally led us into the interview.
Once we got on the topic of “business” I asked Mark if he was opposed to adding some QR codes with a link to his menu to each table. He asked me a few details about, agreed that it would be a good idea, and that painted the path for the rest of the interview.
Some of the questions we went into included the following:
What is your Role at Mickey’s?
Who manages your website content/design?
Who manages your social media?
Who does your marketing?
Who is your target audience today?
Who do you want it to be in 5 years?
Who would you say are your biggest competitors, locally?
What worries you about them?
How would you like people to perceive your brand?
Do you have specific brand standards?
Who manages your brand?
How do you think people feel about your brand now?
How do you feel about your current website?
The total interview start to finish took about 16 minutes. In that time we really covered a lot, and I felt like I learned a lot about the bar itself, and the industry. I worked in a restaurant all through college, and I felt that I had an understanding of the restaurant business, but it is very different when you are the owner of a small business. A lot more thought and care for detail goes into every decision. It was actually pretty heartwarming listening to Mark talk about the bar and the staff and the locals. He really makes it a point to keep the “family” inclusive and happy.
I was able to pull some insightful quotes from the interview:
“With downtown Hollywood changing with more offices coming in I think I might have a larger young professional community.”
“An Irish bar should be a local hangout, family owned, where everyone knows your name.”
“My online target audience is mostly for when I’m doing events.”
“My target age is normally 23 to 54. 50% female/male. I don’t have any ratio. I kind of go through my, my soccer demographic and then just and music, soccer and I’ll put in keywords like soccer music and festival people”“Sometimes I will target an older crowd when I’m pushing food events, depends. Food is 20% of my business. So I don’t often target my food that much because it’s not where I’m at. But I would do a slightly older demographic.”
Next, we needed to interview some of Mickey’s customers, as well as some regular sports pub/ bar goers. As we progressed through the interviews we found it easier and easier to narrow down the questions that we needed to ask in order to get the information we needed.
We quickly saw a trend in our user interviews…people wanted deals, and they wanted to know what to expect before they got to the bar. These two things sound like run-of-the-mill findings, but honestly, I didn’t think people cared that much. Obviously, I am biased because Mickey’s is my go-to, and regardless of the deals I would still go there. But I didn’t realize how important it was to users to know about the Happy Hour Menu, Food Menu, Special Deals, Special Events (like Trivia and Karaoke), and the beer list.
Here are some direct quotes from our User Interviews:
“I want deals”
“I hate when I can’t quickly find a Happy Hour Menu.”
“I want to be able to see what type of events they have coming up.”
“I want to know what types of beers they serve at the bar.”
Affinity Diagram
In order to get a better understanding of the information we gathered through the interviews, we used the Affinity Diagram to help us sort and categorize all the data. We separated all the info into three categories: 1. Why people visit the bar, 2. Website future features and 3. Website cons. Then we went back and and voted on which points to focus on. Finding that a Happy Hour Menu, Beer List, and a general face lift of the outdated site were going to be the main focus.
Empathy Map
We had a general idea of who our customers were but we really needed to understand them better. We used the empathy map to do so. We looked at who the users were, what their goals were, what they needed to do, and what they need to do, already do, see, say, hear, think and feel. This would help to also pinpoint pains and gains.
Persona
Once we understood our user we needed to put a face and personality to them. We put a “profile” together including all the information we have about our average target user, and paired it with a photo and name that we felt captured the essence of what our user would look like according to the characteristics and demographics we narrowed down. Sophie was created.
Storyboards
Before we could dive into what the users’ journey would be, we needed to sketch out the story we wanted them to “act out.” With Eric’s help guiding me through the narrative, I drew out Sophie’s process of looking for a happy hour spot, the pains she ran into, and her final arrival at Mickey Byrnes.
User Journey
We took this trajectory and turned it into a user journey that broke down her moods through the process depicting happy points, pain points, expectations and design opportunities. All resulting in a “Happy Path” for our user.
Problem & Hypothesis
Much like the days of middle school science class, we needed to come up with a Problem Statement and a Hypothesis that we could then use to idea the necessary features for our app.
Problem: Customers find it difficult to navigate Mickey’s dated website. The website does not contain relevant and enticing information. This is causing customer’s to look elsewhere.
Hypothesis: We believe that by providing a more modern, informative and user-friendly website, we will see an increase in sales over all, especially during non-peak hours.
We’ll know we’re right when we see an increase in sales during Happy Hour due to an influx of young professionals and in-the-biz customers.
Before the ideation process could truly begin we needed to come up with How Might We statements to generate ideas on how to solve user issues and improve bar sales and attendance.
How might we… display Happy Hour information and specials on our website to get a better turnout during low sales hours?
How might we… advertise our daily/monthy/holiday events to attract a larger crowd?
How might we… share and update our beer selection for customers & beer connoisseurs?
Through the ideation process we came up with three possible solutions to test out:
- Calendar with pop up modals when hovered over
- Happy hour in website header
- Chalk menu of beer
MOSCOW
Using the MOSCOW method, we were able to prioritize the features that were a MUST have, COULD have, SHOULD have and WON’T have. This is a great tool to really help to flush out all the features we came up with during the feature prioritization stage, and decide which ones are most important, and which ones can wait for another time. It is really easy to get bogged down in trying to take on too much. MOSCOW helps to narrow down the playing field.
MVP Statement
At this point, we had gathered enough information to define the Minimum Viable Product Statement corresponding to the features we planned on adding to the existing Mickey Byrne’s site. The basic purpose of an MVP is to test new business ideas or features early on by releasing them to a handful of people or potential customers and collecting data based on their reactions. We defined our MVP to be:
The goal of the Mickey Byrnes website, at the bare minimum, is to make users aware of what happy hour deals, beer selection and events. Therefore, we must do the following:
Create an easy to use navigation bar that includes happy hour deals,
beer selection and events.By ensuring that these things are available, the user will be able to quickly navigate to the desired page.
Site Map
At this point everything seemed to be coming along nicely and we were starting to get excited. We were so close to being able to create our prototype. We were very lucky that we worked so well together, and had a pretty clear and similar vision of what we thought the site should look like and how it should be laid out. We used our strengths to our advantage and divided the work. I took the lead on drawing up the Site Map. Of course, we first discussed what we thought the layout and flow should be, we wrote it down, and then I connected all the dots. We both agreed that even though we were making edits to the Mickey’s site, that we still wanted it to feel like the old site. We didn’t want people to visit the site and be completely lost. We weren’t changing it completely, we were just creating a better experience for the user.
We created two site maps, a current version and a future site map. This made it easier to compare them and notice the changes.
User Stories
Before we could get to the User Flows, we needed to identify what tasks we wanted the user to complete, and make sure that we provided them with the tools necessary to complete each task.
User Flow
Since I took the lead on the site map, Eric took the lead on the User Flow. It was a bit of a learning curve, but he did some research and was able to nail it. I still have some learning to do as far as User Flows go.
Mid-Fi Prototype
Time for the fun stuff…FINALLY! As an artist at heart and graphic designer by trade, getting to the visual portion of any project is really exciting. I don’t know what it is about just creating something and seeing it come to life.
We used Useberry in order to test our prototype and gather some Quantitative Data and performed some Guerilla Style Tests to get Qualitative data. Below you can see some of the feedback we received. All-in-all, the feedback was positive with very little changes.
High-Fi
We had the option to create a High-fi version of one of our pages. It was totally optional. We discussed doing it only if we ended up having some extra time. After working on the project and getting our presentation ready, I don't even know what came over me…like a creative spark that just ignited my creative juices, and there I was at 3am creating a colorful version of the Beer Menu page. Proud and happy, I went to bed and we were ready to present to our classmates the next day.
Now looking back on this project it feels like it was eons away. We have learned so much since then. But it was the building blocks like this second project that got us to where we are now. The project was challenging but I would call it a success. Thank you Eric for being a team player and a great partner. And thank YOU (yes, you) for taking the time to read this.