Savers Website
UI/UX & eCommerce Design, 2019. Find it here: www.savers.co.uk
My role:
COVID-19 Update: We tripled the website sales from last year in just two months (March/April 2020). This was an enormous improvement, and wouldn’t have been possible without the new site and the user-specific adjustments I continued to make.
Savers came to me asking for a brand new eCommerce website to replace their old static site. It was time to move part of their business online to deal with changing customer demand.
Using the Superdrug website as a base (Superdrug is part of the same group), I provided a full design for the site using Adobe XD and Adobe Photoshop. I worked closely with Savers to make sure that any unique needs were implemented, and to optimise for mobile. I did user testing on the prototypes with WhatUsersDo, and made specific adjustments where necessary to better fit Savers’ focus as a discount retailer. It’s important to note that the design ethos for Savers is not particularly glamorous – it’s about simple, quality products with decent pricing. The design ethos is to be eye-catching and transparent first and foremost.
As part of the website redesign, I also produced a comprehensive banner styleguide for Savers that shows how to design banners for the Savers website. The guide features instructions on font sizes, styles and weights as well as roundel sizing and positioning. Each designer must adhere to these guidelines when creating banners for the site. The styleguide promotes harmony with Savers’ printed catalogue, which is one of their key marketing tools.
The development team didn’t have the time to build some important parts of the site, like the customer information pages, so I built these for them. I also helped the eCommerce team to build out other areas of the site which lacked the requisite functionality. As the website is a blank slate due to the CMS choice, I generally needed to write quite a lot of custom code to achieve project objectives.
What was the outcome?
The site was very successful. Sales grew steadily despite little in the way of marketing. Savers were happy with the number of banner spots because these were important at driving revenue. We produced around 120 new banners a month, and I was responsible for managing production. The design was tightly controlled by Savers as it must look similar to their printed leaflets, but the aim was to deliver them within a short space of time and to a high standard.
I also started building marketing emails for Savers, which drove around 5,000 users a week to the website. These contributed significantly to sales and were expanded further as the user base grew.
Moving forward, I continued to A/B test various areas of the site (including the checkout and main navigation), to increase conversion rate and customer happiness. Before I left the role, I was also working at adding new features to the website, including further social media integration.