Gustatory

Gustatory is a British web-based business connecting coffee drinkers with ship-to-home coffee beans from independent local roasters in the UK and around the world.

As a design consultant, I aimed to create a more useful, usable, and enjoyable interface by reimagining Gustatory's brand identity and simplifying the current site with a more user-friendly approach.

Work Focus

Product Design, Brand Strategy

Role

Design Consultant

Timeline

June – August 2020

Color & Type Refresh

Pulling in an accent color to increase vibrancy on the site, but still preserving the calming and refined quality of the brand.

I focused on 5 main pages to create mockups; those I found most representative of the site as a whole – Home Page, About Page, All Coffee Page, Individual Product Page, and Categorization choices.

Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Sketch (iPad)

The mockups showcase my edits on the left, and the original site design on the right.

Key focus areas and goals for this design were to:

1. Add vibrancy and visual interest to the site, while preserving its calm and refined style. Here, I edited the color palette to include a highlight color, a clean but sharp font, more dynamic imagery, and playful original illustrations.

2. Simplify the site to match the calmness of the color palette, as the tightly wound content structure (extremely dense text, too many selection options) can lead users to inaction rather than continuous engagement. I combined Gustatory's "About", "Why Gustatory", "Why Independents", "Environmental Partners", and "Ethics & Sustainability" pages all in one to better communicate who they are, but with less density and complexity.

3. Create a more user friendly site overall. Many links on the old site were hard to access (difficult for users to find what they were looking for), information was too cluttered (pushed users away from wanting to purchase), and searching for specific product needs was hard to do. I reevaluated the product purchase flow to create more concise navigation bar choices and pages instead of hiding important categorizations in sidebar filters.