A new website needed to perform commercially without losing the brand's distinctive character. User research gave the team the evidence to make confident decisions at every stage of the build.
- Who: David Austin Roses, a purveyor of exceptional roses
- What: A complete website redevelopment
- How: A collaboration between David Austin Roses, Web Usability and Field (a design and development agency) that incorporated Web Usability’s 7 UX steps for building an effective website
- Result: A shiny new website, based on a rock-solid foundation of user evidence
Background
David Austin Roses are one of the leading suppliers of garden roses. Founded in 1961 by David Austin himself, the business has grown to be a global eCommerce player.
A family business to this day, Richard Austin, grandson of the founder and current Director wished to overhaul the existing website, which last underwent a major upgrade in 2020, to ensure it was delivering for the business and its customers as effectively as possible.
From the outset, it was key that this new website was developed from a place of evidence with users at the heart of the process.
What we did
Before embarking on the re-development project, we worked closed with Richard to define a clear, evidence-based approach. This included a host of UX activities before any design work was considered plus continued user feedback once the website began to take shape.
In total, there were 7 phases of work, each building on the one before to build a solid bedrock of evidence on which the website could sit.
- An internal data review and stakeholder interviews: The first step was to define who David Austin Roses’ customers are and their digital goals. This started with an internal data review and speaking to stakeholders to understand the effectiveness of the current website from both the user and business perspectives.
- User discovery research: Next, we expanded our knowledge and evidence base by speaking directly to those customers in a round of discovery user research with 18 people. This surfaced qualitative insight into how customers wanted to buy roses, expanded our understanding of their digital goals and explored the effectiveness of the different parts of the existing website.
- A ‘Top Task’ website survey: To prioritise the qualitative insights, we then quantified them using the ‘Top task’ methodology. ‘Top tasks’ are the goals that matter most to users when engaging with a website. The survey was sent to the David Austin Roses mailing list asking them “When accessing the website, what is most important to you?“. This gave us greater clarity on what customers wanted (and did not want) on the website.
- Digital personas development: Based on the key tasks customers wanted to achieve, we develop unique, digital personas. These provide the team with a common language to talk about their customers and a clear steer on the content that the website needs to support
- Information Architecture testing: The next step was to develop a new information architecture (IA) – how the content on the website is chunked and labelled. Using insights from all the previous phases, we defined a new IA and tested this with 41 target users. The TreeJack testing outputs gave us a clear, visual steer on what worked and the improvements that could be made.
- Content Audit: Next was a content audit to review content effectiveness against user needs. With the new IA in hand, we mapped the existing content pages to this, giving each a score so the David Austin Roses team knew what was working well, where improvements needed to be made and what new content pages they had to develop.
- Prototype usability testing: Finally, using all the evidence collected so far, a prototype of the new website was developed by Field. This was then tested with 6 target users and the insights used to make even greater improvements.
Outcomes
By going through the 7 phases outlined above, using a methodical and user-centric approach to website development, David Austin Roses have built one of the most evidence-based, robust websites we have ever seen. With launch fast approaching, we look forward to seeing the positive impact this has for the company.
Hear the process in action on our Web Usability podcast as Lucy talks to Richard Austin, about why we think they are a shiny example of how to do things correctly.
“When you outlined all of the steps it was hard to say no to any of them because for me they all made sense and I could see how each one built on another. I felt like if you took any single one of them out of the whole process, you’d lose quite a lot” Richard Austin
More about these services
Find out more about our discovery research services (including user research, top task surveys, personas, information architecture development and content mapping), and our usability testing services