Flow, together with Splendid, designed Jamie Oliver's new Jme lifestyle collection website. It was a classic user experience challenge, but this one went further. We soon discovered that the best approach was to integrate the shop with Jamie's already active community site.

Understanding the fans

Jamie Oliver fans like relaxed living and eating with an edge of no-nonsense practicality. They care about the environment they live in and about supporting people who make the food and products they love.

What does that mean for online shopping? We created a hypothesis. Jamie Oliver fans would want:

• Inspiration: How to mix and match products, recipes and ideas so they can live the Jamie lifestyle
• Usefulness: Understanding how products would fit into their lives and help them achieve their goals (a great dinner party, a beautiful home, and flourishing garden...)
• Background and context: Insight into where the products come from, who designs and makes them and why they are special
• Connectedness: Helping customers to form a connection to the community, the product designer and Jamie.

When we considered this, we realised that the Jme site should be integrated with JamieOliver.com, Jamie Oliver's existing blog and community site. Inspiration might come from seeing a photo of a family gathering where a delicious risotto is served in a beautiful bowl. From there, visitors should be able to find out about the bowl and its designer, get the recipe and buy the bowl.

Mapping and testing the site

To understand how the different content should cross-link we created a wall chart. We identified silos, such as recipes, products and forum posts and connected them with arrows. (Jamie came in to see it. He liked it a lot. He's a nice bloke.)

From there, we created a wireframe prototype to represent these ideas ready for testing with users. The most successful website wireframes tend to contain "real fake content" - lorem ipsum doesn't give users a real feel of what the final experience will be like. These wireframes had to contain a lot of visual imagery showing example products, people and situations where they might be used.

User feedback told us two things:

Firstly, we needed to keep our feet on the ground. If you're going to show a desirable bowl customers will soon need to find links to the plate, side plate and coffee cups that match. It also reminded us that you can never be too clear about practicalities like delivery information, pricing and the checkout process.

Secondly, the connected, contextual, useful and inspirational idea made for a great user experience. Jamie Oliver fans loved to use it. And it provides the kind of rich information and emotional content that people need to help them make purchase decisions.

Take a look at Jme

The site is quickly growing into its new home. It's got genuinely fabulous kitchen and dining room stuff, herbs, books and DVDs - all selected by Jamie himself. There are lots more products, recipes and articles coming on all the time. We think it's great to look at and delightful to use.

As Jamie would say: "Nice one!"

Team: Peter Otto, Genevieve Chapman (Splendid), Simon Parbutt (Splendid)