Yijia LiI’m a UI/UX Designer who believes in design as a powerful tool for problem-solving.Click to view my Graphic & Motion Design Works Email

Content Audit: Bloom Cafe Website 

(Content Strategy)
My Roles
Content Strategy
UX Research
Prototyping
Data Analysis
Information Architect
Project Overview
This content audit evaluate Bloom Cafe’s website’s current information architecture and propose improvements to enhance user experience and information retrieval. 




About Bloom Cafe

 Bloom Cafe is a Japanese style desert cafe based in Toronto. Their website is clean and minimalistic, with a few main sections: Home, Menu, Catering, and Contact. These sections are straightforward, offering users quick access to essential information like the café’s offerings, event services, and contact details. The layout is simple and easy to navigation, ensuring a streamlined user experience with no unnecessary complexity, perfect for users looking for clear and concise details.

Website




Website Overview


 Bloom Cafe's website aligns well with both business and user goals, offering a seamless experience for visitors. As a local restaurant, Bloom Cafe focuses primarily on in-store services rather than extensive online shopping. However, the website highlights key products, including Asian-flavoured cakes, pastry boxes, and tea packs. The primary purpose of the site is to facilitate these transactions by offering convenient booking options for in-store pickup and easy access to online purchases.

From an SEO and user experience perspective, the site is optimized to attract potential customers, with the latest update in September 2024. This shows that Bloom Cafe actively maintains its online presence, ensuring that users have access to up-to-date information and offerings.

The website's design is simple and functional, with a clean, organized, and intuitive layout. It primarily relies on visually appealing images and clear product names, making it easy for customers to browse the offerings and place orders. This simplicity enhances the user experience, especially for booking or ordering with minimal effort.

Additionally, the website uses easy-to-read language, contributing to its overall user-friendly nature. This ensures visitors can quickly understand the services offered and navigate the site with ease, improving their overall experience. In summary, the website serves its purpose well by providing a straightforward way for users to engage with the cafe's services, whether picking up orders or purchasing tea packs online.

Data Detail



Content Audit

Issue1:
Inconsistent Labeling The site’s information architecture weakens search effectiveness due to inconsistent naming conventions. While some cakes include the keyword “cake,” like "Strawberry Short Cake" and "Chocolate Hazelnut Cake," others are labelled only by their flavours, such as "Grape Oolong" or "Strawberry Pistachio," without using the word “cake.” This inconsistency confuses the search system and harms SEO. As a result, when users search for "cake," they see fewer relevant options, making it harder for new or unfamiliar visitors to navigate and find the products they’re looking for.





Issue 2: 
Separation Sites
 The Bloom’s Tea site is completely separate from the main Bloom Cafe homepage, leading to a poor user experience. Users cannot easily navigate back to the cafe page, which complicates the site’s structure and negatively impacts both usability and SEO. This lack of integration reduces internal links, making it harder for visitors to explore all offerings and engage with important features like the cafe survey, ultimately lowering retention and conversions.




Issue 3: 
Mislabeled URLs
 Based on crawl data, some of the URL’s name unrelated to the content. 



https://thebloomcafe.ca/pages/test-1 —> Bloom’s Cake & Pastries page
https://thebloomcafe.ca/pages/event-catering —> Bloom’s tea page

Mislabeling URLs can hurt the website's search engine rankings, as search engines rely on URLs to understand page content. When a URL doesn’t match the content (e.g., /event-catering for a tea page), it confuses search engines, making it harder to rank for relevant keywords. It can also confuses users and disrupts their navigation flow. It lead to a poor user experience, causing frustration, reducing trust, and increasing bounce rates, all of which negatively impact user engagement.





Recommendations Report


1. Search System
 Recommendation:
 Improve search system with labeling similar product with the same keywords. Also specify the search results, avoiding unnecessary confusion.

Action:   United keywords for the same products. Instead label each cake with their flavour name, adding keywords “cake” in the label will help user find their ideal products. Also, remove unrelated results when users searching.

Peach Earl Grey Peach Earl Grey Cake
Kyoto Matcha Yuzu Kyoto Matcha Yuzu Cake
Grape Oolong Grape Oolong Cake
Strawberry Pistachio Strawberry Pistachio Cake


Before:
After:




Rationale: In Information Architecture: for the Web and Beyond, it states that "Users won’t always be willing to browse through its structures; their time is limited, and their cognitive-overload threshold is lower than you think" (Rosenfeld et al. 215). This highlights the importance of making the search system precise and efficient, ensuring users are presented with accurate information. 

When consumers use the search function, they are in the "Exploring" stage of their journey, with certain expectations of what they’re looking for. Users may also be in a rush to find what they need, potentially spending less time in the exploration stage. Missing or incomplete search results reduce their chances of finding desired products, adding unnecessary steps and causing frustration. Similarly, users searching for "tea" often encounter unrelated content, like stories or pastries, due to overlapping categories and poor labelling. This not only frustrates users but also harms SEO, cluttering search results, and worsening the overall user experience.



2. Navigation Flexibility
 Recommendation:
 Combine Bloom’s Tea site with the Bloom Cafe site, and create a bridge with two separate websites.

Action:
Add a link on Bloom’s Tea site to allow users to access back to bloom cafe, and add a small section about cafe services on the home page. 

Before:

After:

Rationale: In a large, complex information environment, a complete lack of lateral and vertical navigation aids can be very limiting (Rosenfeld et al. 183). Separating the Bloom’s Tea site and the main Bloom Cafe homepage creates navigation challenges. Based on the User flow chat above, Users cannot return to the cafe page, which disrupts their browsing experience and causes frustration. This disjointed navigation harms usability by forcing users to manually find their way back, which deters them from fully exploring the site. The lack of seamless transitions also reduces engagement with Cafe's key features, such as cakes and desserts, and increases the likelihood of users leaving the site early.

From an SEO standpoint, this separation limits internal linking. Search engines require a site's structure to rank pages effectively. Fewer internal links mean search engines crawl less efficiently, leading to lower search visibility. Additionally, a disjointed navigation experience can increase bounce rates and cause users to less engage with multiple sections. A well-integrated navigation system will help improve user experience, drive engagement, and enhance overall search engine performance.



3. Properly name URL Recommendation:Rename URL to align with website content.

Action: Rename website title as a part of URL. 

https://thebloomcafe.ca/pages/test-1 thebloomcafe.ca/page/bloom_cakes_pastries 
https://thebloomcafe.ca/pages/event-catering thebloomcafe.ca/page/tea_collections

Rationale:
 Mislabeling URLs can significantly damage a website’s search engine rankings, as URLs play a crucial role in helping search engines understand the content of each page. When a URL does not accurately reflect the content. In this case using "/event-catering" for a page about tea. Search engines will struggle to associate the page with relevant keywords. It will reduce the page’s chances of ranking high in search results. Search engines rely heavily on clear, descriptive URLs to index pages correctly, and inconsistent or misleading URLs can lead to lower visibility in search results, making it harder for potential customers to discover the site. Also, it will cause confusion to the user. 



4. Using hypertext to Promote dine-in services Recommendation: Promoting walk-in services on the home page, increasing the popularity and keep update seasonal products. Also provide convince to potential consumer to access the update information and dine-in service.

Action: Adding a hypertext on the home page that directly link to their Instagram page and showing location in google map.

Rationale:
 Through comparing several Toronto Asian flavour local cafe website, including NEO Cafe Bar and The Social Blend. Same to Bloom cafe, all of them use website mainly for pick-up and online shipping services. However, both NEO Cafe Bar and The Scoial Blend all include menu in their website, and promoting dine-in services, which Bloom Cafe lack about. However, at the bottom of the page they include their location and their instagram, but not in hypertext. It decrease the navigation flexibility of the website, and decrease the chance for consumer seen updated information. Since they update majority products that only available in dine-in on their instagram. The Web’s hypertextual capabilities removed these limitations, allowing tremendous freedom of navigation. Hypertext supports both lateral and vertical navigation (Rosenfeld et al.,182). 


5. Navigation Hierarchy Recommendation: Improve navigation hierarchy to make information more accessible, flexible and obvious. 

Action:
Adding a “About us” section that link to the “Contact Us” part at the bottom. 

Before:
After:

Rationale:
 By comparing several Toronto Asian-flavour cafe websites, including NEO Cafe Bar and The Social Blend. It is clear that they primarily use their sites for pickup and online ordering services. However, both NEO Cafe Bar and The Social Blend include their menus on their websites and actively promote dine-in services, which Bloom Cafe lacks. While Bloom Cafe does provide its location and Instagram link at the bottom of the page, these are not presented as hypertext links, limiting navigation flexibility and reducing the likelihood that consumers will access updated information. Most of Bloom Cafe’s product updates, which are often available only for dine-in, are shared on Instagram. Incorporating hypertext would remove these limitations and allow for greater freedom of navigation, as hypertext supports both lateral and vertical navigation (Rosenfeld et al., 182).





Prioritization of Recommendations



High PriorityMedium PriorityLow Priority
Navigation Hierarchy: Bloom Cafe’s main business model relies on their dine-in services. Placing related information such as location, open hours and social media links at the bottom of the page will easily be missed. By improving the navigation hierarchy the problem will be solved. Therefore, this recommendation will be highly prioritized. 

Navigation System: The lack of seamless transitions increases bounce rates and limits the exploration of their key features. From an SEO perspective, fewer internal links hurt search engine indexing and ranking. Integrating navigation will improve user experience, boost engagement and search visibility. Therefore, this recommendation will be high priority. 
 Using hypertext to Promote dine-in Services: Information about Bloom Cafe’s location, hours, and Instagram is available at the bottom of the website. While users can still access it, the placement is not ideal and may not be noticeable enough to encourage engagement. As a result, addressing this issue is considered a medium priority.

Properly name URL: Changing the URLs will improve SEO and increase the site's visibility online. However, since there are only two URLs that need renaming, this task is of moderate importance. As a result, the priority of this recommendation is considered medium.
 Search System: Bloom Cafe is a small business with fewer than 50 products, so a search system isn’t essential for the website. Since the site is simple and easy to navigate, users can easily find products through browsing. Although the search system works, it’s not a priority for improvement given the limited number of products and straightforward layout. As a result, enhancing the search function should be considered a low priority.





Work cited
 Rosenfeld, L., Morville, P., & Arango, J. (2015). Information architecture: For the web and beyond. O’Reilly Media, Inc.