La Chingana

Website re-design for a local Peruvian pop-up restaurant in Atlanta, GA. The objective here was to build upon the existing La Chingana website, highlighting their pop-up events and private catering services.

 

  • UI/UX designer

  • Figma

    Notion

    Miro

    Whimsical

  • user experience

    interaction design

    user/market research

the challenge

Currently, the business has successful turnouts for each event. More often than not, they sell out certain items on their menu.

This success is largely attributed to social media marketing.

As La Chingana works toward becoming a brick-and-mortar store, they want to establish a clear, responsive website where clients can: purchase an event ticket and book a private catering event.

Below, you can see the original website — just a mere skeleton of content and weak information architecture.

 

what the foodies are saying

 

defining high priority changes

To understand the business objectives and before conducting any qualitative and quantitative research, I had a kickoff meeting with Arnaldo, co-owner of La Chingana. We discussed the following business goals:

  • Less reliance on social media and more user traffic on the website to view the pop-up schedule

  • Give users a platform to book private catering events

  • Highlight past events

  • Increase the clientele base

opportunities to explore

 
 
 
 
 
 

drawing board

Based on my stakeholder interviews, I designed the screens prioritizing the content the business owners valued most:

  • Eye-capturing hero section

  • Upcoming events calendar

  • Gallery of past events

  • Social media links/press

After presenting both designs of the home page, we decided to blend the strongest points from each version.

 
 

style guide

While La Chingana’s website was going through change, its personality remained the same. With this in mind, I kept the colors similar to the existing logo.

Prior to building out my full design for La Chingana, I had an amazing opportunity to visit one of their pop-up events. This gave me a deeper feel for the brand’s culture and personality:

  • Inviting

  • Rustic

  • Modern

  • Warm

 
 
 

the solution

Feature 1

private catering

Guests looking to bring Peruvian cuisine to their events can book La Chingana through the website’s form.

 

Feature 2

pop-up reservations

For ticketed pop-up events, guests can view upcoming dates and secure seats for their party via La Chingana’s website.

 

supporting assumptions

To measure the success of La Chingana’s high-fidelity screens, I sought to cover 4 objectives through my usability testing:

  1. To understand users' wayfinding around La Chingana's website

  2. To discover any pain points with the website's UI/user flow

  3. To gather metrics on how long users spend on each page and when completing tasks

  4. To receive any and all feedback regarding the user's experience on the website

4 participants

In-person & remote usability testing

2 tasks: purchase event tickets and book a private event

the impact

insights

  • The simple nature of the business and business/user needs posed a challenge. Ironically, a simple design doesn’t always mean easier

  • Another challenge was designing within the brand identity constraints while keeping the stakeholder’s needs in mind

gained skills

  • Communication — Working with a local business owner helped me polish my interpersonal skills

  • Research — With pop-up restaurants being a newer trend, there seems to be a gap between inefficient websites. It took a lot of digging to find good contenders

what’s next

  • Usability testing — in order to evaluate whether the priority revisions are impactful or not, I would perform additional usability testing and receive feedback

  • Additional iterations — Should the usability testing reveal further room for improvement, I would then reiterate with added solutions