IroKids 2020 Case Study

Three personas meant three different needs, three different levels of urgency and three different ways of deciding what to buy. A new mother searching for something specific shops nothing like someone browsing for a baby shower gift. Designing a single eCommerce experience that could hold all three without diluting any of them was the real problem to solve, and it meant we couldn’t lean on what already existed. We had to build the experience around the people, from the ground up.

We always start our projects with a stakeholder workshop and this project was no exception to that. We facilitated a workshop to surface what the team already knew about their users, paired with a web analytics review run together with NopServices, Irokids’ digital marketing agency, to understand what was actually happening on the site at a behavioral level. After the workshop, we were able to create an initial model of user flows and common behavioral patterns.

In order to go deeper into users’ needs and problems, we decided to talk directly with a sample of our three personas, arranging and conducting a series of user interviews so as to understand their perceptions, the problems they faced, their needs and their expectations.

Design followed directly from those insights. Once we had a direction, we ran guerrilla usability testing sessions on the new design to catch what the interviews couldn’t, and iterated based on the findings.

The redesign covered:

• A “dominant” search functionality to support the main interaction pattern, i.e. easy and efficient searching for specific products, categories and brands.
• An improved navigation and new content structure addressing the needs of the users.
• A contemporary design that brought a newly developed brand identity to life on the eShop, moving away from the icon/illustration approach, common among competitors, in favor of real, relatable photography of parents and their children, something users could see themselves in. Our approach drove emotional connection and engagement.
• A streamlined, 1-page checkout that cut down on steps and friction between “add to cart” and “order placed”.
• A completely redesigned mobile experience which is now more content-focused and therefore user-focused.
• Last but not least, we introduced a blog section and product landing pages to promote and support the forthcoming digital marketing campaigns.