Overview

IFN Modern was a mid-century modern ecommerce website. They wanted to create make their own furniture in-house, and offer custom-built sofas and armchairs to their clients.

Main Objectives

Find out what the users need

We needed to present customization as a viable and attractive feature. So we first needed to find out what users who needed custom built sofas needed.

Figure out how to introduce a beta concept of it to the users

It would still be a while until in-house production began, and until then, we needed to implement a "beta stage", where we would use what we found to start introducing custom build sofas and customization

Initial Research

Competitive Analysis

I explored how different ecommerce sites presented "customization" or "tailoring".

Survey

We asked our long time customers a series of questions regarding what their customization needs were for sofas and armchairs. Unfortunately, this data has been redacted due to an NDA.

Project Insights

Needs

Primarily using the data we got from the survey, I divided up the requirements in to 3 main categories: Style, Size and Specifics.

In other words, the user needed a particular style, a specific size for their home, or they were extremely picky about materials and specific styles (these answers usually came from Interior Designer customers)

It's in how you say it, and how you treat it

The language, I found, could make the biggest differences in how users treated custom products in eCommerce. For instance, if you say "tailor", it adds a certain level of prestige to it. The word "Customize", as I surmised from my analysis, more closely referred to changes that were more surface-level: colour and material. Since we were talking about furniture that would be made entirely to the customer's specifications if they wished, we decided to add the word "built", and go with the term "custom built"

IDEATION: Beta Phase of "Customization"

I deducted that the product page would be the place to attract those who needed Style and Size changes. They were users who didn't realize custom built would be an option.

On the product page, they would learn that custom built furniture was an option.

I also created a "fit guide" for those who needed to get an estimate on sofa size, and pointed those pages to a new page introducing our in-house custom built furniture