Pets at Home
Help pets get treats
HERDING CATS
Pets at Home had many parts to their business and bringing them together coherently was part of the challenge faced by the agency that brought Question in to assist in the the UX challenge that was presented.
Too many landing pages and too many disparate brands, but there weren’t enough ways of easily navigating between their complimentary services.
GET IN YER BASKET
There were also issues with the way some of the fulfillment options available to customers were presented in the basket and checkout. Some items would end up being thrown out of users’ baskets without their knowledge, resulting in confusion and disappointment.
A thorough assessment of all real-world delivery combinations - as well as all possible basket permutations - was required in order to apply a commonsense rationale to the way this was presented to the customer.
A RIGHT DOG’S BREAKFAST
One of the other main problems encountered was in decluttering the interface to reduce cognitive friction. There were a lot of complications - particularly around pricing - which gave users too much thinking to do. It’s not that there weren’t good reasons for a lot of this complexity, but we pushed hard in gaining permission to decrease the amount of information required on page.
Where some additional pricing detail had to stay, for example the Subscribe and Save price option, we built some strong text hierarchy into the wireframe in order to show the user where to look first.
Overuse of CTA buttons was another issue to resolve, as this also added friction. Testing showed a high rate of stall when confronted with multiple CTAs on PDPs. So we started paring these back, for example, removing the Store Selection CTA button from PDPs and instead opting for a passive default.
Reducing to one CTA on A/B testing showed a jump of 450% in engagement (much to the delight of the client) so we proceeded in that direction.
BEST IN SHOW
The synergy between the UX and UI was very evident, and elegant solutions were found to the many issues that presented themselves.
Further hi-fidelity user testing continued, along with live A/B testing of some proposed changes to the checkout process - the client wanted to be sure of the right course of action before commiting. After all, they do turn over a billion pounds a year so a mis-step would have been costly.
The client were very happy with the end product and the company saw a notable uptick in sales after the overall design work was completed - revenue to 2023 went up by 7.9% - with our efforts being no small part of that.
The previously disparate nature of the brand’s online offering now feels like a cohesive whole, and it presents as a market leader - a far higher pedigree to its peers...
