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!]