UX Case Study : Designing an E-commerce Website, for a Wood Artisan, from Scratch

Elsa Pietrucci

13 min readJan 11, 2021

The client is a young artisan making unique wooden furniture and willing to sell it through a website.

TL ; DR

Project duration: October 2020 — December 2021
Goal: Creating an artisan E-commerce website based on user needs
Methodology: Quantitative and qualitative

Methodology:

Guerrilla user interview
7 hypotheses, 2 MVP and 1 interactive final prototype were generated;
I gathered feedback from 8 interviews, 183 survey respondents and 5 user tests;

A. Starting Hypotheses

The main obstacle for buying furniture online is the impossibility to actually visualise it
The user needs some tools to best imagine how the furniture will fit in their home (colour, dimension, materials)
Knowing the history of the artisan is very important and decisive in the buying process
Furniture made in France and ecologically will encourage users to buy
Having comments from others is very useful as they can’t see nor touch the product
Having a unique piece of furniture is crucial for buyers
Being able to choose the type of wood is also significant

B. Empathize

I started this research, chatting with my client about his needs and expectations. It allowed me to better understand the sector and constraints of being an artisan.

Then, I checked what other wooden furniture websites were offering. What features and design? Which information or storytelling? Which prices and general approach to artisan lifestyle.

I found common features such as pictures, specific descriptions, artisan story, materials, personal account, search bar and more specific ones such as custom made furniture.

Research Methodology:

I decided to use a mixed methodology (quantitative and qualitative) because it allowed me to get deeper into user behaviour and needs. The quantitative tool helped getting a more accurate picture of what the user wants, likes and understanding the global features needed.

However the qualitative phase helped to dive deeper into users’ feelings and perception. These two methodologies together allowed me to design a complete user experience gathering features and options with storytelling and emotions.

After learning a bit more on the sector and understanding the client needs, it was time to gather some user experience data. In order to do so, I chose to use quantitative methods first to gather as much information as possible on user behaviour while buying furniture on the internet, what were their main difficulties and what was most needed.

Then I conducted 8 interviews in order to get deeper in user habits and wishes. The qualitative method part was influencial as the project concerned a small artisan and not a big E-commerce company so I needed to understand what users who like unique pieces, antique shops or wooden/ecological furniture were exactly looking for and what were their expectations as they would represent the main target audience for this kind of website.

I conducted a survey among wood and decorations lovers to better understand their online shopping habits and the features they would want or wouldn’t want on this type of website.

I gathered 183 answers which give interesting indications on the type of people willing to buy this kind of furniture and what they would like to find on the website.

We can observe that:

the majority of the respondents live in big cities and or aged between 25 and 35 years old.
The large majority is sensitive to ecology and French made products.
Having an authentic experience appears also important as a majority would love to have their pieces signed.
Also, they like to have the choice regarding dimensions and wood type.

These results tell us that in order to buy wood furniture they need features which help them imagine as close as possible from reality how the furniture will look like and to have the possibility to choose some of the characteristics.

To investigate even more, I conducted 8 users’ interviews. The interviewees were recruited by respecting a representative panel regarding wooden furniture interests, incomes and age. I recruited them in front of specialised shops and flea markets in Paris in order to catch some bargain hunters.

As it is a guerrilla recruitment, I decided to have very short interviews with only 7 questions in order to facilitate the participation.

Finally, the quantitative part was particularly helpful regarding global features and the qualitative one more about the feeling and experience users were looking for such as authenticity, identity and eco-friendly/wooden experience

Once having this data, I made 3 personas to help me better understand users’ profiles and experiences in order to adapt the features and services.

-> 3 types of user emerged from the interviews and the survey respondents:

Olivier Rollin, 36 “Being eco-friendly is a big part of my life”
Béatrice Adari, 44 “I love exploring antique shops to find the right piece for me”
Elisabeth Marinari, 63 “I am not buying often on internet because it is most of the time too complicated

These three personas would buy from the future website for different reasons:

authenticity,
having a unique piece,
finding easily what’s needed without leaving their home

Then I wanted to understand their customer journey better so I made a customer journey map for each one of the personas. As the website didn’t exist yet I used a classic E-commerce furniture website as a focal point to determine what what missing, goals and pain points they were going through while buying online.

We observed that the pain points could be similar during the buying experience even if the buying motivations were not the same. For instance they were all scared of:

Bad quality and finition
Being disappointed at reception
Not having the full experience in touching, watching and smelling the wood

C. Define

Following this research, I was able to confront my research hypothesis and to narrow user needs and pain points:

Some of them were validated :

The main obstacle for buying furniture online is not being able to actually visualise it
The user needs some tools to best imagine how the furniture will fit in their home (colour, dimension, materials)
Furnitures made in France and ecologically will encourage users to buy
Being able to choose the type of wood is important

And other partly or totally unvalidated :

Knowing the history of the artisan is very important and decisive in the buying process :

-> Surprisingly it is not that important as most of the users seem to find it only “interesting”.

Having comments from others is very important as they can’t see and touch the product

-> It is important but some of the users don’t really trust them. However the majority states they looked at it before buying

Having a unique piece is important for buyers

-> Here as well the hypothesis is not confirmed as it appears not to be that important for 59.9 % of the respondents

This verification, helps to rank the website information for instance the history of the artisan won’t appear on the landing page as well as the tailor-made service (allowing unique pieces).

D. Ideate

I needed to organise and categorize this data in order to have a clear view of what was needed and being able to hierarchise information according to users priorities.

In order to do so, I decided to use an Affinity diagram through a specific session with the client. This video conferencing workshop helped us rank and understand relations between groups of information to create an overview and synthesise the findings. We put some research outcomes, quotes, questions and statements together and finally three main categories came out of this ideation exercise:

Brand Identity / What’s happening outside of the website ( the artisan’s work, material, specificities..)
The features / What’s happening while the user is actually using the website
Feelings and emotions / Facilitating the overall experience

After having these three main user experience categories and moments, we started brainstorming what kind of solutions could apply to each of them, such as:

The main problem is about difficulties to buy without being able to see, touch and check the quality. Some features could help solve it such as: self-tailored options, big and clear pictures including dimensions, videos, client review, quality guarantee and easy return.
Regarding the brand identity it could be : unique pieces with the artisan’s signature, profile and storytelling about the artisan, made in France and ecologically specifications, offering visits to the artisan’s studio
To facilitate the overall experience we could use : efficient search tool, secured payment, delivery details, advice from the artisan for each product, personal account with purchase history, indication of the price and time needed to make the piece.

Then, we found ourselves with a lot of solutions and needed to define the main constraints in order to be able to classify them from what was most important and what was impracticable.

On the client side there were constraints such as :

The client is an artisan but also an artist and he didn’t want a typical self tailored practice. He preferred to have clients inspired by his style and ask for self-tailored furniture according to it. Which is a difficulty as it clearly narrows down the number of users.
It became clear as well that an intermediate phase between choosing on the website and paying will be needed as a validation call between the client and the artisan to agree on the specificities is essential.
The client also has a small budget which didn’t allow every possible features

At this point, it was also important to consider development difficulties. I asked a web developr to help me determine what was difficult to implement or not and it appears that features such as 3D or 360° to visualise pictures were pretty difficult and could be expensive.

Finally, with all this information I was able to determine what was necessary to implement immediately and what was not with the help of a prioritisation map.

We decided to first work on the most important features regarding the 3 main pain points:

Bad quality and finition : self tailored, customer reviews
Being disappointed at reception : guarantee and return, personal account with order history
Not having the full experience in touching, watching and smelling the wood: choosing the wood, personalized advice, pictures enlargement

And the 3 main user needs for this type of sales:

Authenticity: story about the artisan, offering to visit the studio, French and ecological making
Having a unique piece: unique piece signed
Easily find what’s needed without leaving their home: delivery and price information visible, instructions video

At the same time, features such as videos and search bars will be designed later as for now not enough furniture was ready and making videos would need a bigger budget. Also regarding a possible newsletter or sending wood samples seem to be difficult as the artisan is working alone and these require a lot of time.

Finally, we decided not to do all visual ameliorations such as the 360°view , augmented reality or furniture visible in 3D as a bigger development budget would be needed.

E. Prototype

At this point, I needed to create a site map and a user flow for each one of my personas in order to understand how the users will navigate through the different pages.

Then I was ready to prototype, on Miro, the different web pages in a basic way just to place features and buttons in order to run some user tests.

F. Test

I have conducted 5 user tests through video-conferences with some people who answered the survey. They were between 28 to 63 years old which allowed me to get a large age panel.

Test protocol:

The first task I asked them was to go over the landing page while explaining what they were seeing and telling me what was missing or misunderstanding
Then, they could choose to click wherever they wanted and access another page. This allowed me to see what was the most interesting CTA on the page for the users and for the majority it was the first one leading to the creations.
Then they had to go over the new page and tell me their feelings and if they didn’t understand something as an icon or a CTA.
Finally, I gave them some specific tasks to achieve such as buying a table, making a self tailored bench, going on their personal account and leaving a review, checking the artisan history and credentials and going to the photo gallery.

At every step they had to describe any difficulties or specific feelings they had.

They all expressed some difficulties, misunderstanding or suggestions to improve their experience such as:

Indicating the delivery options and time needed for fabrication on each creation page
On the pre-order page, add to the options, the shapes of the furniture
Adding the possibility to save the pre-order for later (creating an account and receiving a confirmation email)
Adding a disconnect button on personal account
On the landing page adding a CTA “more information” leading to a page with info on the main steps of an order and delivery/guarantee info.

It was also suggested to add categories to the creation section on the landing page and the page dedicated to it but as there are only 6 creations available for now, I decided to keep it for later as well as the proposition to add a search bar with filters.

G. Iterate

After running the user tests, I understood better how users navigate through the website and features, often realizing that it wasn’t as expected. Thus, I made the changes listed above as well as some others such as :

On the landing page I changed some icons such as : validation and fabrication
Adding the possibility to see different types of wood and their specificities
To create an account adding address and phone number
Add to the section “personal info”, “further information” with door code, stairs… to facilitate delivery
Along with the instruction video on how to assemble furniture, add a classic drawn instructions

Regarding the message and content, I adapted it to focus on the creations rather than on the self-tailored part, as the artisan wanted to and in order to make it simple to understand for the users.

Making an inclusive design:

Also in order to make the website as inclusive as possible we decided with the client to have an inclusive gender approach through making sure the possibilities weren’t only binary male / female and using gender neutral language as much as possible

For instance :

Sir / Madame / other
Instead of “Ils témoignent” use “témoignages”

H. Final Prototype

In order to create the high-fidelity prototype, I used Figma.

First of all I needed to design a logo. I wanted to have natural and soft colours which reminded of nature and wood. For the logo, I chose a pale green and white. It is very simple and represents the brand name initials BA (Brin d’Arbre).

Then for the rest of the design, I used the logo colours and some variant as welle as black, white and wood backround

Final prototype :

Intercative Marvel prototype :

Next Steps:

In order to have an actual website, some steps still need to be undergone such as :

Making new and more quality pictures
As the budget doesn’t allow to have a web developer yet, the website will be first implemented on Webflow

Room for improvement :

Difficulties to find the right balance between what the user research told us and what is actually possible to do in reality considering:

development possibilities within the budget
the client possibilities and wishes

For instance as the client is an artisan it was difficult to offer many functionalities that would need updates such as a newsletter or new creations. Also regarding the customer service which is difficult to insure while being alone.

I realised how much it is important to discuss a lot with the client before starting in order to understand his world, work, wishes and fears. It allows to propose something really adapted to him and the users.

It is also very enriching to discover a new world which in this case was about wood and how passionate the artisan is as well as the user can be.

The main difficulties were :

to work with a small development budget
to select the best suitable features and services within the different constraints
to get good photos of the products and environment
the artisan is also an artist, he is in a creation process which can take time so he didn’t have many pieces ready to sell but a lot of great ongoing ideas which he plans to realise soon. It was sometimes difficult to showcase his work in the best way and trigger users /clients interest.