Mitre 10
Redesigning how users navigate and shop at one of NZ’s largest retailers.
About
Mitre 10 has been a part of New Zealand's home improvement culture since 1974 and are the largest home improvement and garden retailer with 80 stores across the country.
With online sales not meeting their success metrics and data from internal research showing key journeys were falling flat for their online customers, they tasked Roam to do a deep dive into these journeys and redesign them to better serve their customers and reach their business goals.
For this project, I led a team of 3 designers over a five-week period of discovery and detail design delivering these redesigned journeys into Mitre 10’s internal development team.
My role
— Product design lead
— Workshop facilitation
— Client presentations
— UX/UI design
A unique process
Due to the short deadline for this project we set out a process that would allow us to quickly make decisions, start designing and get the work in front of key stakeholders each week for quick feedback to iterate on.
We broke each week into key modules or pages and took each of them through the same process. We had to consider the short time frame throughout pulling heavily from the client’s domain knowledge, prior customer insights and research of e-commerce best practices to guide our work.
Getting around
Mitre 10’s catalogue of products is vast and span multiple departments. The big problem with the older navigation was that it was easy to get lost in the sheer volume of products and it didn’t guide customers to where they wanted to be.
For the redesign, we used levels as a way to step customers down and guide them through the catalogue. The mobile navigation was designed to be full screen as to not overstimulate the customer with clear actions to close or go back to the previous level.
Using the website while instore
Through our rapid research and interviews with the Mitre 10 team, we became aware that the website was not just being used to purchase goods by customers, but instore, as a way to check the stores stock.
Because of this, we introduced two new pieces of functionality. Firstly, a store selector in the navigation with clear messaging about the store you were viewing and the ability to swiftly change your store. Secondly, for customers to quickly scan, we used colour and iconography to communicate the availability of products relating to their location.
