To be honest there are not really any problems with Sweaty Betty! Their business has gone through the roof and they recently sold to an investment firm. But, as is the way with phenomenally successful businesses, they are always looking to improve. So the challenge was to test out and improve the shopping basket functionality with the objective of increasing conversion rates and average order value.
This is a project I did working at the amazing agency Tryzens. I have a bespoke research process called Honest Shopper where I create prototypes of new ideas, interview customers and create revised versions at high speed. This is unusual as it gets to the final designs much more quickly than regular customer testing.
The end results were superb, with 78% approval of the new designs and increased conversions in the live site. Exactly what they wanted.
I am not ashamed to say I love this brand. And that was only emphasised even more so when I got to meet Adam the founder and understand the vision.
The problem was, ironically, the brand. It had been updated for high street signage, POS and print. It needed to be translated online.
I saw another problem - the brand is great but the site itself was not really at the same level of quality. Customers needed to be wrapped up more in the incredible brand story.
I could talk about this all day! I have a process called Editorial Design, which is where you take a brand, define its narrative arc and integrate that into the shopping funnel. Hats off here in particular to Jamie the guy running the show at OB. The results have been stunning. Now, instead of an amazing brand fighting with a bland site, you get an immersive, hypervisual, and very effective new experience, with key KPIs all shooting up.
Normal CRO programmes can take up to 12 months to show any reasonable results. They are designed by agencies to be drawn out over a long time and be expensive, never promise anything or offer any real innovation but offer proven conclusions. Everything is based around hypotheses and experiments. They require a long term commitment.
CRO programmes tend to miss out a couple of things which I have built my career around - common sense and smart ideas. I believe if you look at things the right way it's easy to make things much better. You can support your ideas with data, similar trends from elsewhere online and asking a few customers. So I created an alternative to the CRO programme called Eye Site, which gets an arguably better job done in one month for around 10% of the cost. No wonder clients have been loving it.
The world's largest custom chocolate company. They create multiple millions of chocolate products per month for clients like Microsoft. But, one of the directors had redesigned the website to his own ideas, and online sales had fallen by 78%. They needed to change without feeling they were starting again.
I workshopped broad UX principles with the directors to get them thinking about the importance of customer experience. I then created a new website design. Online sales increased by 643%. I also looked at machine learning and AI, and reinvented some processes, replacing an ineffective manual process with an automated online API, which created new product categories designed to be easily bought online.