Coffee, Tea, and B2B with Aramark/Javia

Aramark engaged my team to design two new digital experiences:

Aramark: a Business-to-Business (B2B) site for corporate clients
Javia: a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) site for small business and individual customers

Aramark is an international food services company that is best known for supplying office break rooms with supplies like coffee, tea, sweeteners, and related paper products.

A key requirement was to produce a flexible and simple-to-use B2C site first relying on code and an interaction design could be re-purposed with minimal changes for the B2B enterprise site.

The assessment of user needs turned up differences in the way customers purchased Aramark’s products.

User Objective: B2C shops for products, while B2B manages inventory
Volume: B2C makes relatively small orders, while B2B almost always makes large orders
Frequency: B2C orders weekly or less often, while B2B orders weekly or more often
Repeat: B2C typically orders different products each time, while B2B usually orders the same products repeatedly
Locations: B2C has a single location, while B2B is managing multiple locations
Payment: B2C pays by credit card, while B2B pays by invoice

The final design accomplished all goals on time and on budget. The client was pleased, and the Javia site won the Silver ADDY Award from the DC Ad Club that year in the interactive media category.

One part of the Aramark project that I ran point on was the redesign of the cart and checkout experience. During the project kickoff, the client team told us about a superb shopping cart experience that they wanted to model their cart on: it was the cart experience for Lowes.com. As it turned out, I was on the UX team for the Lowes.com redesign two years previously. I don’t mind saying that having my handiwork singled out as a model made for a very satisfying commencement to the Aramark project.

See the results at http://www.aramark.com/