One of the challenges of selling furniture online, is that a lot of customer would rather go to the physical store to touch and feel the pieces, but on the other hand, what are some of the benefits of buying furniture online?
During my time at Westwing this was a question that was deeply explored, how can we as an online shop help the user imagine how the pieces would look like in their space? One of the tools used to fulfil this purpose was the Room Planner. A tool that allows the user to put all items together in one moodboard, and see how they work together.
The tool allows for the user to add items from the whole catalogue by searching or navigating through a menu, as well as from the wishlist. Once the product is selected the user has the possibility to turn it, move ir around the artboard and adjusting its size. Once the moodboard it’s done it can be saved or downloaded for future inspiration.
During the first phase of the tool, it was important to introduce it to the customers, so we also created a Landing Page explaining the new tool and the advantages of using it. Furthermore, during this phase it was only launched for Desktop, which meant we needed said landing page to inform the users that they could only use the room planner from their computers.
Dividing the project in clear phases, and saving more complex features for after testing if the tool was at all popular amongst the users, allowed for the project to launch in under eight months, and for new functionalities to be developed with qualitative and quantitative data from the users regarding which features they missed the most.
Isabel Ochoa Blasco 