Why the search for avocado yarn turned into our latest web feature
Designing for inspiration
As product managers, our goal is simple: listen to our customers, understand their problems, and craft solutions to bring joy to their lives. So, how do we understand the problems of our makers at LoveCrafts? We have a few options to start with:
- Talk to our customers directly — It takes time and effort to talk to our makers, but we find these chats can be super helpful when we want to dive deep into a problem. There’s nothing quite like a real life conversation!
- Catch up with fellow smart, kind, makers across the business — We speak to Smiles (that’s what we call our customer service folks) to understand what our customers are having trouble with, or check in with team leads to catch up on priorities across the business
- Run customer surveys — We regularly review feedback in post-purchase surveys — there’s so many amazing opportunities to uncover there!
- Review forums (e.g. Ravelry, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter) to see if our customers are sending feedback carrier pigeons to the wrong address
- Review the quantitative data at hand
But if you really want to delight your customers, you have to dig deep to uncover the best opportunities. When something is broken, it’s easy to see how you can be happier. But it’s not always obvious what’s broken. And that’s why innovation is messy. And incredibly fascinating. To innovate, you have to listen closely to discover the unarticulated needs your customers may not even know they have.
Finding and discovering
These past few months we’ve been working hard to make sure our customers can discover and find what they’re looking for. At the beginning, the solutions we needed to introduce were clear. We saw a lot of people were landing on pages with zero results. We got it. We have products with incredibly complicated spelling — I for one will never be able to spell Scheepjes correctly on my own. That was a no brainer: we introduced typo tolerance to our search!
But what if you don’t know what you’re looking for and you just want to browse around? How do you improve that experience? Enabling customers to find what they are after is easy; you just have to point. Enabling customers to discover is the hard part.
Avoyarn saves the day
On our LoveCrafts site, we have thousands of inspirational articles. These articles are carefully crafted to inform, engage, and inspire our makers. But when looking into the data, at first, it didn’t seem like our customers were searching for articles. How could that be? We had millions of searches for free patterns but apparently no searches for articles like The Great British Make Off: free patterns for the Bake Off!
That’s when Avoyarn saved the day. I decided to dig a little deeper into the data and found that, yes, on the surface, people didn’t seem to look for articles. But when I dissected the data by day I discovered big spikes of searches that had 0 results. On April 1st, for instance, we had sent out an April fools email to our customers talking about our newest and trendiest yarn: avoyarn.
Some of our customers were so eager to get their hands on this new yarn that they went straight to the site. Of course, when they searched for this product, they had absolutely no results because, despite my hipster dreams, this yarn doesn’t exist. The customer journey was terrible. April fools gone wrong: they never knew they were fooled. And this wasn’t the only time it happened. Our new ‘yarn wizard’, our new ‘Bauhaus collection’ — inspiring content that couldn’t be found.
We hypothesised that our customers would benefit from seeing more of our articles, even if they weren’t looking for them. For instance, if you’re looking for Christmas inspiration, it might be easier to look at an article with curated Christmas suggestions, rather than scrolling through 100 pages of results. The search for ‘avocado yarn’ became the push we needed to kick the project off.
A move in the ripe direction
Now, if you’re searching for inspiration, you have two tabs: one for product results and one for articles. As with everything, we decided to build the minimum viable solution to validate our proposal quickly. We know there are already many improvements we can make: from features that were lost along the way, to the customer discoveries we are making now that the feature is live.
For now, we’re happy our customers can say farewell to the days of looking through thousands of pages for the best yarn to gift a beginner — they can simply search for “beginner” and stumble upon Which knitting wool is best for beginners?
As one of our customers put it: “the new search makes life easier, it takes me less time to find a new project to work on”.
I think that’s a Bravocado to us! And time to get creative for the next features.
