Blooming Cookies

Blooming Cookies is a small, gourmet delivery cookie company in Atlanta, GA. In Spring of 2002, they approached me about doing a redesign for their site.

While talking with Blooming Cookies, I also discovered several other issues with their site, and had put together a complete discussion of their architecture and security issues, as well as usability issues dealing with their site, which were included in the proposal. I am well equipped to act as both a technical and graphical advisor.

Please note there are no wprking links on the pages, aside from the one to the other design. This was just a proposal template. What I did:

• Design:
  • Blooming Cookies was concerned about the static-ness of their website, so I created a flexible basic design that had changeable parameters; the site would seem familiar to anyone coming to it at different points of the year, but would change feel to encourage repeat visits
  • Created a more framed page, that would bring more of Blooming Cookies' product to the forefront at critical seasonal times. At the time, their page require horizontal scrolling.
• Script:
  • I worte a small script to dynamically change the page, in order to show that it could be done.
• Proposals:
  The Following are part of the suggestions that I offered Blooming Cookies at the time of the proposal. They Are to show my methods, and I am unaware if Blooming Cookies has implemented them.
  • Security Issues: credit card information was being transmitted via unsecured pages. I provided them with a proposal for securing that, with general costs, and an implementation schedule.
  • Usability Issues: I conducted a small, informal ten user study, and determined a number of problems with their interface, dealing with the horizontal scrolling to the search engine to the fact the site required registration to begin to place an order (customers needed to do a full registration just to start using the shopping cart, which meant that customers couldn't impulse buy at all). I reported the general issues to Blooming Cookies, with details on how I wanted to approach doing a more complete usability test.
  • Marketing Issues: Customers were not being pulled back to the site - there was no reason for them to use the site at all, in fact. Many specials were offered only by phone. I outlined an online marketing plan involving both increased search engine exposure as well as use of mailing lists, product give aways to keep users on the list, etc.