Case Study: Ironhack Bootcamp project #2 Koekiedog.nl
For our second challenge it was required for us to redesign a local e-commerce website and deliver an interactive Mid-Fi prototype as our final product. We chose to collaborate with the Netherlands based family business Kokiedog.nl, which sells organic dog treats.
Our goal was to optimise the User Experience on the page by conducting user research and designing an experience that was closely tailored to Kokiedogs target customers. I collaborated with my bootcamp team: Joao, Hajrah & Lotte. We had a 2-week deadline for this project.
We worked remotely from different timezones, meeting up almost daily to collaborate on the different challenges via Zoom. We worked in a highly cooperative manner, discussing ideas as a group in order to guide us to the best outcome and with a clear separation of tasks with individual deadlines we set for the team for each subtask. This allowed us to split work and collaborate more efficiently. We used Trello for creating a Kanban board outlining tasks and responsibilities and worked with Miro for documenting the User Research as well as Figma for creating the Designs.
Our results would form the foundation of achieving more conversions and a better customer experience.
We started by building a Kanban board for our tasks with Trello and phrasing questions we wanted to ask our Stakeholders, the owners of the business in order to understand their vision for the website.
The stakeholder interview was conducted in Dutch by Lotte and later translated to us. We learned that the customers of Koekiedog were people who are conscious of their dogs diet and want to provide them with healthy treats.
We summarised the main insights of the stakeholder interview shaping the vision of the business and the Design of the website:
We proceeded with conducting competitor research, focusing on a Branding comparison and a feature comparison in order to help us understand better what our redesigned website should incorporate.
Based on our insights from the competitor research, we located Koekiedog within the existing market:
We gathered the inputs from our stakeholder interview and market research and evaluated their current website www.koekiedog.nl to build a Lean UX Canvas, which would help us knowing what we needed to find out in our User Research:
In the following step, we conducted User Interviews. Each of us interviewed 3 dog owners, which helped us build our Empathy map. Our main intention was to gain insights into the relationship between the dog owners and their dogs diet, how much attention they paid to it, what where their buying habits for food and things they considered important for their dogs diet, as well as if their dog had any underlying health conditions or a strict diet plan. We also inquired about where they got their information from. A lot of dog owners shared with us that blogs, Trustpilot reviews, recommendations from their friends and Social Media guided their decision on where to buy their products from. We used our Users answers to build an Empathy Map canvas.
To narrow down our most important findings, we created an Affinity Diagram with our Users responses and grouped them by similarity.
Based on our insights, we created our User Persona “Dogly Daniel”.
Our following steps were to create Dogly Daniels User Journey, to understand his current emotions, thoughts, the actions he took, which frustrations he encountered and what we could do to turn these frustrations into opportunities to design a better user experience.
We concluded our problem statement was concluded from his User Journey:
We used the MOSCOW-method to identify the must haves, should haves and could haves of our Redesign. This helped our understanding of how our Minimum Viable Product should look like (MVP):
We mapped the current architecture of the website and developed the future Sitemap:
We wrote User Stories for the Epic “Buying the Birthday Set” and proceeded with designing our User flow.
Our next step was to come up with concept sketches. At this stage, we had a clear idea of what we needed to incorporate into our concept sketches:
In our Lo-Fi prototype, we integrated everything we learned from our previous research and our understanding of what the future website should look like, as well as best practices from competitors throughout the industry, not to ignore industry standards.
Before we proceeded with our Mid-Fi prototype, we did Concept Testing to get feedback from Users as to how they experienced our current version and what improvements we could make. Each of us tested with 3 users again. We received detailed feedback from the users, helping us understand similarities in their interaction with the redesigned website and what was not intuitive to them.
We implemented the changes we learned were necessary from our users behaviours in our updated Mid-Fi prototype. Before we reached the finalised version of the Mid-Fi, we conducted User testing again and received feedback for retouching our visual design.
As a final result we designed an interactive Prototype which can be found here.
With delivering the interactive Mid-Fi prototype we concluded our project. Our key learnings was that it helped us gain valuable insights for how our product should be implemented by involving the Stakeholders as well as conducting User research. Testing our product along the way helped us constantly recalibrate our execution and stay centred around the users needs, aligning it with the business goals.
