UXDI — The John Lewis Microsite

The Challenge

Armed with the brief on the London Underground, in between stations and changes, it was clear that my commute alone wasn’t enough to understand it all!

In context, John Lewis had conducted research into their home & furniture market. They had discovered that customers had found it difficult to decorate their homes in a particular way, as well as find the time to do so. John Lewis also understood that some customers needed more advice about how to furnish and/or decorate within a budget.

A microsite would be required, separate from John Lewis, yet still have the brand identity and style of John Lewis. A few features should include, yet not limit to;

• Provide user inspiration for a variety of design styles
• Help users estimate the cost for achieving a particular style
• Allow users to track and share what they have purchased
• Streamline the payment process

The Users

The personas were given as a representation of the market, outlining various pain points and lifestyle habits.

Michael, a 35 year old Assistant Manager found it rather difficult when budgeting his projects, along with poor order tracking and confusing navigation.

Marcia, a 50 year old Customer Service Manager had struggles with long checkout processes and poor search tools

Midori, a 29 year old Graphic Designer, claimed that she was overwhelmed with ideas and would like a site to give design inspiration and would want to know whats popular.

After assessing the personas, I decided to focus on Midori’s pain points, when building the microsite. In my opinion, I felt that Midori represents a John Lewis customer; an enthusiastic character, with a lot of design ideas and a key determination for modern styling and different cultures. Along with these, Midori mentioned her favoured brands such as Audi, habitat & Ralph Lauren, which I believed are well established brands that sit alongside John Lewis.

The Research

After conducting interviews, I did a direct competitive analysis and assessed the branding, navigation and social outreach of home furniture and design companies, specifically IKEA, Habitat & Made.com. A big factor was an ‘Ideas & Inspiration’ tab, which gave users an insight to designs and concepts when building a bedroom, a living room or a kitchen. This led to an idea of giving users an interior designers sketch of what the room would look like, based on the items in the basket. An early development, but certainly something that would give a USP to this microsite.

From an open card sorting exercise, it showed a physical representation of how user’s minds work. Without getting too psychological, I had various cards with various products from the John Lewis Home & Furniture department. In 10 minute intervals, I allowed my users to sort these cards in a way that seems logical to them. As a result of this, I saw that the common way of prioritising these items was in rooms, rather than style of furniture (e.g. lighting, furniture, bedding, storage etc.)

The Solution

From all the research and analysis of users behaviours, I created Home Design by John Lewis:

• A Microsite specifically for home and furniture design.
• Choose the room, choose your inspirations and your budget
• Combine wish lists with sketches of your chosen room, your way.

The Process

The first step was to outline the processes away from digital. I looked at the behaviours when buying items in store, tracking items and choosing a design style for a room, without any technological input. From here, I looked at ways to streamline these processes online, without taking away the core functionality.

After this, some initial sketches were done to highlight each area and the users movement around the site. I would test these sketches with some persona representatives and understand their behaviours when following through the site.

I conducted a design studio to outline a common problem when testing. Users found it quite difficult to distinguish their inspirational items, with things they wanted to add to their basket. From this, I designed pop up tabs on either side of the page which would make it clear about what inspires them and what they actually want to buy. Items in a Wishlist can then be added to the basket. Items in the basket could be viewed in a room setting, by selecting the ‘View Room’ button.

After finalising my sketches, I created digital wireframes using Omnigraffle. A new software for me, but certainly brought my creation more to life. Through many versions and testing, I came up with some wireframes that was put into an Invision prototype. Click here to view the prototype of the John Lewis Microsite.

The Feedback

Feedback was positive. The functionality of the site was down to a point and was clear that a lot of research and testing had gone in to perfect it. The idea of viewing a sketched room before purchase seemed like a very creative and inspirational idea that would be interesting to see, if this was taken into development. There were a few questions regarding the design of multiple rooms, and this is definitely something I would explore, if given more time.