Crocus.co.uk is the leading online nursery in the UK. They’ve just launched their new website, with a focus on customer experience, and a great new IA. They are getting wonderful customer feedback...

'Oh my gosh! How cool is that??! So much better… the best, even! Hurray! The drop-down menus provide loads of inspiration. It's a great system. I LOVED using it!'

We're proud to say that Flow was part of the project. And we think it's interesting for two reasons:

• The site is an enjoyable, inspirational online experience designed to deliver an emotional connection and brand loyalty.
• The site provides an easy-to-use facetted browse, to help customers find the right plants, whatever their selection criteria.

Three experience-based sales strategies

To capture the joy of gardening, and build an emotional connection with customers, Crocus needed to offer an experience to match the typical gardener's needs, motivations and behaviours. It turned out that there were three types of gardener....

• Experts: They want full control and lots of information.
• Task-based gardeners: Want to focus on specific tasks, like building a pond or getting ready for Autumn.
• Aspirational gardeners: They want to "get the look" that they saw in a magazine.

So the site needs to include meaningful content and navigation for all three types.

The "what's your style?" section of the site presents a selection of different garden styles, allowing aspirational gardeners to explore and day dream. There are "jobs for the week" and "right plant, right place" for the task based gardeners. And the search box and A-Z allow experts to pull up detailed information quickly, along with suggestions and inspiration.

To help all the different gardeners find the right plants for their needs, the site also provides a facetted browse.

Iterative design and simple facets

Facetted browsing is an increasingly popular way to help customers find products within a large selection. The idea is to let people narrow down their choices by selecting from a range of criteria in any order, until they see a manageable product list. On Crocus.co.uk the criteria include things like flower colour or soil type.

Information architects love the power of facetted classifications. But our research told us that they can be very hard for customers to really use.

We knew a difficult interface wouldn’t boost sales, so Flow ran several iterations of testing with target users to look for an answer. The research provided inspiration: we merged the part of the interface where you select the criteria with the part that displays the criteria you have already selected. Suddenly, users told us, it all made a lot more sense. (We picked up some other tips along the way and we'll do a post or a paper about it soon).

Happy customers, bright prospects

Results from Crocus.co.uk’s post-launch survey have been very positive. The new site helps customers see a wider range of products, make informed choices, and really enjoy the experience of buying plants online.

92% of respondents said the homepage was better than before.

'Made me want to look further - some web sites are so "busy" that it puts you off and you don't want to go further'

And the facetted browse received an overwhelmingly positive response:

'I looked for plants for dry shade using right plant right place - it was very easy to use'

Sales stats are still in the pipeline. But user feedback gives us confidence that there will be a significant uplift.

'[The best thing about the new site?] Being able to see how to get to everything that is available. This really wasn't very clear on the old site.'

[UX Team: Ian Worley, Anthony Mace, Peter Otto, Karen Wall. Nice Job!]

It has been hyped as a profound development in the advertising and social media landscapes: Facebookers are being transformed into "fansumers". We can choose to "friend" a product or brand as part of our Facebook profile and that brand can pay to promote that affiliation to all our friends via our feed. To marketers, this looks like gold dust: large scale word-of-mouth endorsement via trusted friends.

This raises a couple of interesting questions for me:

1. Are we being manipulated horribly? Or will this actually mean more power to the consumer?

2. If a brand is going to be my friend, how will it really need to behave?

More Power to the consumer?

Marketing brought emotion into the business / consumer equation long ago. Brands play on our emotions and promise us certain feelings. But these days, more of us are seeing through the hype. Customer experience, the reality or interacting with a product or service, is where those brand promises are kept or broken. We soon stop believing the brand messages if the staff are rude or the product is hard to use.

The new Facebook model suggests that the rewards for providing a good customer experience (CX), and the fallout from providing bad CX, will be clearly visible to marketers, and quickly too. People will only carry a brand message if that brand delivered the customer experience it promised. No-one likes to be friends with a person, or a brand, who breaks promises.

Friendly brand behaviour

Not breaking promises is a good start. But brands that want me to affiliate myself with them in any proactive, substantial, and ongoing way, will need to do more.

Firstly, they'll need to work hard to avoid psychopathic tendencies that their parent organisations can display (in an ironic postscript development, Facebook's implementation of the new model has felt like 'callous unconcern' to many and the fallout continues).

Secondly, they'll need to be interested in me, rather than talking about themselves all of the time.

Ultimately though, if I am going to become a firm and vocal friend of a brand, it will need to share my values and have a purpose I can respect. For me, that means brands will need to become more active in protecting and improving the world we all live in. When talking to me, and many like me, brand opportunities and corporate responsibilities will morph into each other, towards something that looks like the triple bottom line.

So here is my message to my future brand friends:

Do you want to become a more meaningful proposition to me? Do you want us to bask in the glow of one another's friendship? Do you want me to introduce you to everyone I know and tell them what a marvel I think you are so that your sales hit the roof?

The show vision. Have purpose. Be more. Do more. Make cool stuff that works really well, sure. But to inspire my genuine regard you will need to address the pressing problems that affect and concern me at local, national and global levels. Ignore these problems and you ignore me. Contribute to them and you'll probably be shunned by everyone I know.

As brands become more 'alive', humanised, and socialised, in order to compete in increasingly competitive markets, I expect the successful brands will be those who use their energy and immense leverage to address the social and environmental problems that we all face.

It will be corporate social responsibility but evolved, collaborative, and with teeth.

We posted in early November about the upcoming launch of the new GNER website. Well, it's gone live, and the customer feedback is really fantastic.

But since the east coast main line franchise has now been awarded to National Express, the site has a new name: National Express East Coast. It's still the same user experience apart from that.

What's interesting is how this new brand will get a dramatic boost from the investment that GNER made in user experience.

Absolutely brilliant

The website's customer team is having a field day with positive feedback about the site. Here is a glowing example.

"Absolutely brilliant! Beautifully set out… it even let me CHOOSE MY OWN SEAT IN THE QUIET CARRIAGE! I'm going to call their web team (whose phone number is actually there on the site) to thank them in person. I've experienced so much utter rubbish from car rental and train sites in the past, you can't believe the relief I feel at the fact that someone out there is getting it right!"

The blogosphere is also responding positively. For example...

"By chance I stumbled onto GNER’s site. They have recently moved to their own custom-designed ticket sales system, and I must say they’ve done a very good job indeed. […] it shows a list of prices and a list of possible route-times. […] It also managed to find a great deal more routes than The Train Line did, in less time. And what’s more, you can of course buy tickets for any UK train from any UK train company.
In future, I’ll be buying all of my advance tickets online from GNER, as their website is much more intuitive than the others. Good work GNER!"

Good user experience builds brand

Did you see the customer switching loyalty to the new brand there? 'Course you did. Interacting with your organisation easily, efficiently and enjoyably means a lot to people. It was the quality of the user experience that made that switch happen.

The switch will happen again for a lot more customers. With word-of-mouth advertising like we've seen here, news will spread fast. The new National Express East Coast brand will benefit, arguably far more than from any advertising campaign. Customers will migrate to the new booking site from competitor sites, increasing revenue and generating opportunities for new customer relationships.

GNER and National Express East Coast were prepared to invest in user experience. It looks like the stats will show that investment was the right decision.

How to get these results for your organisation

The level of positive response that this website is getting is really remarkable, and especially so for a version 1.0. We got the result using a team of talented people and by following a user-centred design approach. Here's more about the techniques we used.

And the talent? A huge round of applause to the Flow and Splendid team who worked on this: Simon Hatch, Alejandra Obregon, Alistair Thomson (Splendid), Dan Morris (Splendid), Martina Schell, Karl Wortmann (Splendid), Kelsey Smith, Caroline Green and Ed Hastings-Evans (Splendid). The project director was Flow's director of user experience, Ian Worley.

And of course, congratulations and thanks to Atos Origin and TMW for top class development, coding and content integration.