Franklin's
The experience starts before you walk in.
The warmth was real — it just wasn't reaching people before they arrived.
Franklin's has a strong in-store experience. The brief: close the gap between what first-time visitors expected digitally and what they actually found when they walked in.
Team lead on a five-person UXDG 101 project — from fieldwork to final prototype.
Led and contributed across every stage: structuring the research approach, directing fieldwork, synthesising findings, defining the IA, and driving the high-fidelity Figma prototype.
Most friction started before anyone walked through the door.
Contextual inquiry at the café — barista and customer interviews, plus a SCAD student survey. The website was outdated, the service model unclear, and the in-store warmth had no digital equivalent.
Their warmth was real. It just wasn't reaching people before they arrived.
KEY INSIGHT_
Users don't think in business categories — they think in tasks.
Card sorting on FigJam revealed four natural buckets: Menu, Order, About, Contact. That structure became the backbone of the redesigned IA.
Every design decision traces directly back to a research finding.
The homepage was restructured to surface practical expectations earlier — seating, service style, hours. Navigation reduced to four items; the order flow redesigned as a clear sequence with explicit progress cues.
We tested a full order — small cappuccino, skim milk, vanilla syrup — from discovery to checkout. Users completed it with no major breakdowns. The flow held; we made the call not to iterate.
The redesign didn't change Franklin's identity — it made it clearer upfront.
Task-based navigation, a restructured homepage, a cleaner menu, and a step-by-step order flow from discovery to checkout.
The most important job of a team lead is keeping the work honest.
The experience gap wasn't a design problem — it was an information problem. If I were to continue, I'd explore in-context digital touchpoints at the storefront itself.