Freelance UX Lead, Amstedam

A retail experience for DIY home makeovers

Creating a digital retail experience that let's Karwei's customers preview product samples in their homes, while in-store.

Karwei is one of the leading DIY store in the Netherlands, with a focus on interior decoration. Whilst working at Dentsu Creative (formerly Achtung! and Isobar), Karwei asked us to kickstart an innovation pipeline, exploring and testing opportunities to improve the customer experience and integrate digital into their retail ecosystem.

A key problem space that emerged during discovery was related to how customers experience shopping for their biggest product categores; floors, walls and windows. Choosing a new wall colour or wooden floor is a stressful, high impact decision to make. It's also the reason most people visit Karwei stores - to touch, feel and experience samples of these products. But it's very difficult to imagine what these small product samples will look like in their personal space. I facilitated a 2 week design sprint to solve this problem, where we concepted, designed and built both a technical POC and clickable-prototype to test with customers. Afterwards, I led a multidisciplinary team through agile development sprints where we scoped, built and launched a fully functional pilot experience in their flagship store.

Year

2019

Agency

Dentsu Creative (previously Isobar)

Contribution

Workshop facilitation, discovery research, concepting, wireframing, interaction design, prototyping, user testing, story mapping, roadmapping, measurement plan, design leadership, stakeholder management.

Development

Superhero Cheesecake, Luke Vink

Awards

1x Spin Award

Karwei Style Studio — With a quick sketch of their room and a scan of any product sample in store, customers can try thousands of Karwei products in a 3D model of their own home.

01 — Draw

Turn a quick sketch into a 3D model of your room

Our simple solution for creating a 3D floor plan of your room, together with our ‘learn-by-doing’ approach to user onboarding, ensures users are setup and styling their rooms in no time.

02 — Scan

Scan or browse thousands of product samples

Customers scan “physical” floor, wall or curtain samples they’ve collected in store to add them to their “digital” collection. Digital samples can also be collected by browsing and filtering the full catalogue within Style Studio itself.

03 — Style

Style your room and save your shopping list

Drag furniture presets to roughly replicate your space and begin styling it with the samples you've collected. Rendering rooms as a professional moodboard sketch ensures users get an impression of their room quickly and encourages style exploration.

In-store pilot study

With the MVP built, we ran a three week pilot study at Karwei's flagship store in Amersfoort, conducting both quantitative and qualitative research with 188 shoppers. After receiving positive results from the first pilot and creating a backlog of usability and integration improvements, we were asked to scale the pilot to 15 stores. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and retail space closures, the project was ended prematurely.