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The client
National Book Tokens (NBT) has been inspiring book lovers since 1932 - the gift card that generations of children have found tucked inside birthday cards. NBT has a newer product, Bookily, which takes the idea further: send an NBT gift card to someone and have it automatically topped up each month, so the lucky recipient can choose a new book every month.
The gift that keeps on giving. NBT believed in it. Bravand believed in it. People who bought it seemed to love it. The challenge was getting more people to subscribe.
The brief
We met with Josie McGhee, Product Manager, and Petros Matos, Ecommerce Manager, at NBT to understand where things stood - then handed the Bookily site to Bravand's UX specialist Alexa Sielaff for one of her now-legendary roasts.
The roast
A roast is a structured UX audit - a thorough, honest review of a site or product from a user experience perspective. Alexa's roasts can be brutal, but they need to be heard and, more importantly, acted on.
In Bookily's case, the audit surfaced a familiar set of issues: too much effort placed on the user to figure out what the product actually was and did; too much happening on a single page; too much text, too cramped, too small; calls to action that were unclear, too numerous, or appearing too early in the journey.
The outputs formed a discussion document that went back to Josie and Petros. Much of what Alexa had identified was already on their radar - which is not an issue. Bravand's audit helped validate what they'd already begun making the case for internally, and surfaced a few things they hadn't yet considered.
The outcome
With access to Google Analytics and Hotjar, further discussions with the NBT team and Josie's own mock-ups of potential new designs in hand, Bravand closed the project with a final report and recommendations - delivered just in time for the NBT team to implement changes before their code freeze. Several recommendations from both passes were acted on quickly.
"Sometimes significantly improving a website or service doesn't mean spending months on a project, absorbing a huge budget and involving a board of people. In many cases it is enough to demonstrate current issues and guide through the editing process of elements that are already on the site."
Alexa Sielaff, Bravand
Think your product site could be working harder?
A Bravand UX roast is a fast, focused way to find out. Get in touch with the Bravand team.
