Valentina's Tex Mex BBQ
A brand redesign for a true taste of Texas
Final pitch deck available here
This was a project I worked on with other UX designers during my time at Razorfish. It was a rebranding campaign we created for a local food truck, Valentina's Tex Mex BBQ. In a matter of two and a half weeks, we were able to conduct extensive user research, competitive analysis, a full site redesign and a final pitch to the company.
Valentina’s owners wanted to serve delicious, high-quality food that exemplified the chef's Mexican heritage and Texan roots, with a long-term goal of opening a brick & mortar restaurant. Primarily, they served out of a food truck parked by a gas station far on the southside of town or via catering, but recently added a smaller food truck with limited offerings in downtown. This was necessary as the bigger food scene was more concentrated in the center of town. However, the restaurant's online presence was in need of a revitalization, both in terms of their site as well as exposure around the highly competitive food & barbecue scenes in Austin, TX.
Research
To start the research phase of the project, we interviewed the client to better understand how they saw their brand and customers. They told us how they built their name on consistent, high-quality food and service, and that they were highly revered even within the competitive BBQ landscape by peers like award-winning pitmaster Aaron Franklin.
To gain insight on customers, my team created a user survey for locals and professionals who frequented downtown for lunch and dinner. Additionally, we interviewed customers at other food trucks and restaurants around downtown, as well as Valentina’s own patrons, and discovered the importance word of mouth, quality, and shared experiences had when it came to where people choose to eat. Through competitive analysis on other food trucks, BBQ, and Tex-Mex restaurants in the area, I was able to gain a better understanding of their online presences, site design, and online ordering systems.
Previous "site" design
Whiteboards from our ideation sessions
Early sketches of the site design
Desktop site design
Mobile landing page
Mobile ordering experience
Order checkout page
Design
With research complete, the next phase was design. Valentina’s site at the time was extremely basic, essentially a picture of their menu as the home page with hours and location. My team and I decided to do away with the previous site and transition it to the Square Space platform, where there would be better options for us to design a polished, responsive site and the client could more easily run & update it themselves. Leading the team through an ideation and whiteboarding session, we iterated on the site design until there was a clear vision and my teammate built mock ups.
With those mocks in-hand, I began building out a prototype in Axure that we could use to demonstrate during the pitch. We wanted a mobile friendly ordering experience as a core part of the redesign, so I examined other mobile app and browser experiences for ordering food (Yelp, Favor) to better inform my design. From that I learned we should emphasize the food with large images for users to select for their order, and to include swiping interactions to change between menu pages as that’s a natural interaction pattern for mobile users.
After helping the team restructure the narrative elements of our presentation, we pitched the site design and rebranding to the client as well as senior leaders at Razorfish. The client was enthusiastic about the vision we’d developed and while the restaurant never fully realized the work as we'd envisioned, they did renovate their website using a similar design to our proposal shortly thereafter.