Timeline
October 2025
Client
Foodland Ontario (Ontario.ca)
Role
Senior UX Specialist
Improving the Foodland website
I supported the Foodland Ontario digital team with conducting user research on their newly designed website, with the aim to improve the newly designed Foodland Ontario website. Through this research sprint, our team of 2 designers aimed to understand how Foodland's industry partners can best be promoted on the new site, while also improving the user experience while browsing and ordering merchandise and marketing materials for their businesses.
Good things grow in Ontario, so let's harvest a better online experience
The Foodland Ontario team redesigned their website, where shoppers can learn about seasonal and local produce. Serving as a consumer promotion program, Foodland Ontario aims to provide businesses and organizations promotional resources to market locally grown produce.
How might we…
…improve the redesign the of the Foodland Ontario website to effectively showcase and support industry partners, while delivering a seamless, user-friendly experience for ordering promotional materials and merchandise?
The product roadmap
This research sprint builds on an existing Foodland Ontario website mitigation project that began in 2024. This progressive cross-functional roadmap considered mitigation, UX, publishing, and security considerations for the scope of the project. My involvement began in October.
Design planning within the broader roadmap.
Addressing user needs
In this phase of research, we set out to understand how industry partners would:
Use the new Foodland Ontario website
Use the Foodland logo agreement
Navigate to key website features, including browsing and ordering point of sale (POS) merchandizing and marketing materials and;
Complete the POS webform
We talked to 6 industry partners across Ontario to learn about their experiences engaging with Foodland
3 industry commodities
2 food services
1 producer
User interviews
Our sessions were all 1:1 remote usability tests, which I led with the support of another senior designer and two students. For all the sessions, my team and I documented insights and user feedback for further analysis.
A screenshot of our Miro board where we documented user insights.
Redesigning the redesign
Agility at its finest
Guided by our research goals, my team and I addressed the user pain-points and provided several recommendations to improve the overall usability of the new Foodland website and site features.
Users have varying preferences for the new Availability Guide
While some users were delighted by the newly designed Availability Guide, several mentioned that they would prefer alternate layouts.
From left to right: Original Availability Guide PDF and new on-site Availability Guide.
Challenges
Excessive scrolling
Users valued efficiency and preferred quick access to relevant produce.
Content sorting
There was a strong mix of users who had preference in content being sorted by season, produce, and month.
Highlighting content
Users wanted foods available year-round to be more clearly highlighted, as some didn't notice this feature until they scrolled down.
Solutions
Navigation links
We included in-page navigation links to help users jump to their desired section.
A 2-version guide
While Foodland wanted to keep it's new seasonal guide on their website, we created an alternate version for users to sort by produce and month "at-a-glance."
PDF alternative
The alternate version of the guide was designed as an accessible printable PDF.
Before and after adding alternate "calendar style" printable PDF option and navigational links.
Printable calendar-style PDF Availability Guide.
Users find the process of browsing and ordering of materials complicated
While some users were delighted by the newly designed Availability Guide, several mentioned that they would prefer alternate layouts.
Challenges
Browsing before ordering
Users did not expect to see the CTA to order merchandising material prior to browsing what they could purchase.
Solutions
Restructuring the IA
We recommended reordering content hierarchy to ensure relevant content is prioritized visually.
Correction of form fields
We flagged errors in form fields and recommended adding a confirmation page and order summary page with an estimated time of delivery.
Integrating the browsing and ordering experience
We recommended exploring on-page webforms to integrate the order form into the marketing and materials catalogue page.
Users highlighted other features of the website that they did not resonate with or would like changed. These sentiments were relayed to the Foodland Ontario team with corresponding recommendations to address these user pain-points.
Limitation
The scope for the MVP launch of the website limited our ability to translate all our recommendations for this phase of improvement, including the integration of the catalogue and order form and form confirmation page. However, the team has noted to consider these changes to be made in future iterations of the website.
Additional user sentiments and recommendations
Users highlighted other features of the website that they did not resonate with or would like changed. These sentiments were relayed to the Foodland Ontario team with corresponding recommendations to address these user pain-points.
Challenges
Stock images are not representative of users
Many users felt like the images used across the website did not accurately reflect Foodland partners and local produce (i.e. not wearing work clothes, non-Ontario produce)
Users do not resonate with the word 'Industry'
Some users would associate the term with "industrial," or found the term to be "cold" and "generic."
The Media tab does not match expectations
When prompted, nearly all participants assumed that the Media navigation tab would include content relating to press releases, local news, or other marketing-related information.
Solutions
Using authentic images
We recommended that images should be reconsidered to accurately reflect users and Ontario produce.
Reconsidering labels
We recommended to reconsider using alternate words to describe "industry partners" and "media" to better reflect users and content shown.
Changes to images used to represent industry partners and Ontario growers.
Limitation
Although users did not resonate with particular words used on the website, Foodland's team has decided to keep these existing terms for now, as it currently resonates best with their business and definitions.
The MVP
A newly designed Foodland Ontario
With the launch of the MVP scheduled only a month after this research sprint, our recommendations were considered and scoped for future iterations of the new website. For the MVP, changes to the availability guide and merchandising and marketing page were made. However, Foodland team aimed to move forward with their continuous site improvements after their initial release, including POS forms, image and content revisions, and long-term goals of exploring the integrated shopping experience.
Before and after the Foodland Ontario website redesign (MVP).
