Wren Kitchens
Wren have become one of the most popular retailers for kitchens in the UK in the last few years. After the release of their premium range, Wren decided to have a design overhaul of their online experience to keep it up to date with their current branding, and increase appointment conversions. Our brief was to create the strategic, UX and visual design solution.
Company & role
Tribal Worldwide London, UX Lead
Tools
- Axure: User flows, IA and wireframes
- Google sheets: Audit
- Google Analytics: Data analysis
Challenges & considerations
- SEO impact: Wren have managed to make great tractions on their SEO. This influenced UX decisions and created challenges around the amount of content that was required to be displayed.
- Google Analytics: Every decision we made had to be rationalised against current GA performance and behaviours.
- New functionality integration: A new my account section was being introduced into the site and it was our job to work out how this would be integrated, and where this best sat in the current structure.
The process
- Distill: Interviews with potential kitchen buyers about the process and competitor reviews of existing websites.
- Define: Development of a conceptual model around 3 user goals, as identified from the research.
- Design: Wireframes & designs were produced based on the research conducted, as well as SEO and GA input.
- Develop: As part of the agile sprints, the designs were constantly reviewed against the requirements and research in order to iterate the concepts.
Customer interviews
In order to fully understand user needs and goals when buying a kitchen, we carried out interviews with 20 people who were either in the process of buying a kitchen, or had previously purchased one in the last 12 months. We asked them questions around their purchasing journey, motivations for buying a new kitchen, as well as asking them to rank competitor sites based on the BERT scale.
Conceptual model
From the interviews, we were able to create a conceptual model that identified 4 main stages and 3 user goals within the kitchen purchasing process. These would be referred to throughout the process in order to validate ideas and designs.
UX audit
Wren provided Tribal with a list of pages that were high priority for launch of the new site. Based on this list, I completed a UX audit to understand the pages and components required to migrate the bulk of the content. We identified the need for 16 templates and 64 components. This allowed us to estimate timings of the project, as well as getting better understanding of potential business and user requirements.
Scamps & the conceptual model
After the UX audit, the UX team drew up scamps of the page templates and components required. This allowed us to capture initial ideas on how to improve the experience of the pages, and also identified the opportunity for new components and functionality.
Throughout each stage in the process, we referred back to the conceptual model and research to ensure that the new pages were meeting user requirements.
Wireframes & functional specifications
Once the scamps were approved, the designs were transferred into high fidelity wireframes using Axure. Alongside creating adaptive views across mobile & desktop, detailed UX annotations and specifications were created to aid development. We first created the page templates for each of the high priority pages, and from that broke the page down into components that could be built in in the CMS as reusable elements.
The design
Learnings
- UX audits do not complete the full picture: business requirements are a must to catch any new details that the existing site is not currently meeting.
- Involving stakeholders in UX reviews is vital: only having some stakeholders review the UX can lead to problems later in design if there is not complete buy in.
- Research packages help to paint a picture and get stakeholder buy in: being able to refer back to research and GA data helps to create strong arguments as to why certain decisions have been made.