Keurig
Background
The brand is recognized for its widely used brewing machines and K-Cup pods and has established a strong presence online through its e-commerce platform. The website allows customers to browse and purchase products, manage auto-delivery subscriptions, and access resources. As a vital part of Keurig’s customer experience, the website significantly influences user satisfaction, particularly for returning customers who depend on its features for convenience.
Problem
Despite its stylish branding and product offerings, Keurig's website does not provide users with a smooth and error-free experience, especially when it comes to more complicated tasks like managing subscriptions. From the standpoint of a long-term customer, ambiguous labels, inadequate error management, and cluttered menus lead to unnecessary irritation.
For Keurig, this results in a potential loss of trust, decreased engagement, and an increased amount of time spent on customer service interactions. Enhancing the usability of their website is important for retaining customers and ensuring the experience remains as pleasant as possible.
Process
To assess the site's usability, I started with a heuristic evaluation based on Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability principles. I utilized various user tasks to pinpoint violations, assigning a severity score ranging from 0 to 4 for each identified issue. This approach revealed multiple problems, such as unclear navigation labels, confusing error messages, and restricted user control during essential tasks like adjusting auto-delivery.
To enhance my assessment, I conducted a remote card-sorting study with several participants. The objective was to see if Keurig’s information structure matched users' mental models. The results indicated that content categories such as “Gifts” and “How to descale your machine” were not positioned where users anticipated, and participants even created new categories like “Blog” and “Articles” to understand the site’s content better.
Drawing from the insights I gathered, I developed a number of redesign suggestions aimed at enhancing navigation, minimizing user mistakes, and aligning with user expectations.
Finally, I transformed those suggestions into a set of redesign comps. These illustrated the suggested changes, including:
● An updated auto-delivery process with an undo option and a confirmation screen before finalizing changes
● Moving popular filters like “Roast Type” and “Caffeine” from second-level to first-level navigation
● Enhanced error messages providing clear explanations of issues along with suggested solutions.
● The navigation menu has been restructured based on insights from the card sorting exercise, featuring improved labeling and more intuitive categories.
