OHME! Foods: Crafting a Credible Experience
UX Design & Research
February 2025 (3-days)
Designer & Researcher
🏆 FLUI Hackathon Finalist (2nd out of 168 participants)
Overview
CLIENT
OHME! is a health-focused food company that reinvented breakfast bowls with freeze-dried fruit toppings.
OBJECTIVE
How might we create a seamless, fun, and energetic purchasing experience while increasing brand integrity and credibility?
Impact at a Glance
Purchasing is Effortless, Elegant, and Engaging
To create a smoother shopping experience for OHME! Foods, we refined the site’s structure, eliminated friction points, and made products more accessible. Through simplifying navigation and keeping selections within reach, we ensured a more seamless path to purchase.
Letting the Product to Speak for Itself
The updated landing page grabs attention with a bold hero section, showcasing exclusive partnerships and featured products to spark instant engagement. A striking visual element clearly communicates OHME!’s unique value, ensuring users trust and understand what sets the brand apart.
PROCESS
With a crisis of trust and identity, OHME! needed to lean into value.
Client Direction
Our stakeholders wanted the website to feel fun and energetic, while also being a premium brand. They aimed to streamline purchasing and enhance engagement by improving the visibility of community impact.
Research & Realizations
After conducting a site audit, our team recruited 3 participants adhering to a rough persona for semi-structured, 30 minute user-interviews. We uncovered a multitude of insights, including things like information overload, decision fatigue, and accessibility issues. However, participants were saying something that really encapsulated what our users were feeling. They said that they wanted to buy freeze-dried fruit now, but not from this company, because they couldn’t trust them.
Lack of trust in OHME!
"I want frozen fruit now, but not from them because I can't trust them." "The brand feels temporary and not timeless."
Information Overload
"There's too much information and it's very confusing." "I feel like I'm not equipped for this type of website. It's too much."
Issues finding information
"Where can I actually go to learn about the product? It takes too long."
Structural Clarity
BEFORE
Confusing navigation, cluttered pathways, and a fragmented purchasing journey leading to information overload. Their social proof (sustainability page) was hidden in the footer,
AFTER
Easy access to product pages from the start to streamline the purchasing journey. Social proof was consolidated under an “About” page so users know OHME! is credible and active.
Too much, Too Soon?
Our early wireframes showcased every product on the homepage, but it became clear that this approach was overwhelming and hard to navigate. Was there a better way to simplify the process and reduce overload?
Product Consolidation
Following deep discussion, our team decided to merge OHME!'s 30 different listings into 4 categories of product lines. This decreases fatigue and prevents users from being overwhelmed, facilitating smarter choices.
Visual Direction
We had to balance between OHME!’s vibrant, maximalist identity and the need to evoke a sense of trust and quality. Narrowing the design to a few bold shapes and tones, the result felt intentional, premium, yet still energetic.
IMPACT
Premium, energetic, and confident in showing, not telling.
Digestible Experiences
After consolidating product categories, we had to make sure other options were still easily accessible. Users can now switch between flavours right on the landing page, without being overwhelmed with a barrage of 30 product listings.
Embracing Value
Our client mentioned that they wanted their brand and packaging to be front and centre and the users felt the same. Focusing on brand feel, our new website made sure to exude the personality and energy of the brand and its products through a dynamic hero section and informative visuals.
Guiding Purchases
Participants told us that the product page had too much going on, so we organized images to add structure and reduced cognitive load through improved visual hierarchy in the purchasing modal. We also removed unnecessary Tiktok media and replaced it with customer reviews to increase trust in the product.
FINAL DESIGNS
Nourishing the User Experience: OHME Foods! Final Designs
Takeaways
Welcoming the process
Working from the ground-up accounts for design debt and makes the rest of the process easier. So many times, I get the urge to just jump right into designing after conducting research (especially after working for a fast-paced company like Samsung). This was especially prevalent because we didn't start designing until the end of day 2, so I was super worried about our chances of completion. However, this experience taught me that despite time constraints, having patience and trusting the process of collaborating and iterating makes for better and more efficient design.
Breaking the “I Got This” Mentality
I used to hesitate to ask for help, worrying about "bothering" others if I felt capable of handling a task myself. During this sprint, exhaustion pushed me out of that mindset—I reached out to mentors and my incredibly talented teammates, and the results spoke for themselves. By collaborating more openly, I was able to tackle challenges more effectively. Moving forward, I want to be unapologetically upfront about when I need support, knowing that great work comes from great collaboration.
What could we have done differently?
Our internal collaboration was top-notch, but I think one area we could have improved on was taking our time to really connect with users post-redesign. Although our user interviews provided insight on what needed change, our solution wasn't properly put to the test until we reached the judges panel. User research is gold and I feel like we left more to be desired in that aspect.