Embedded Files
2019-2021
Delivering a premium retail experience for Europe’s largest producer of Cannabidiol (CBD) products.
The original design for the Blossom Swiss site
In addition to the difficult to see CTA’s on the left, users complained that the cannabis leaves and iconography made them uncomfortable
Introduction
This was a project in an industry that was new to myself, the agency and the majority of people living in the United Kingdom.
Despite a lack of empirical data supporting the claimed benefits of CBD, the industry had seen a sharp increase in the demand for CBD products. Our challenge was to deliver, market and trade an Ecommerce site for the Blossom Swiss brand to capitalise on the growth in demand.
Two extracts from the competitor audit research I conductedThe heuristic evaluations were used to help identify opportunities for Blossom Swiss to establish knowledge authority
Team
In this project I was UX Lead, working with a hybrid UX/Digital Designer, a Senior Digital Designer, an Ecommerce Manager, a Project Manager and a developer. This was a team I had worked with on a number of projects and by this point we were lean, agile and had developed great working relationships.
On the client side, we working working the organisation that established the Blossom Swiss brand, Emmac Life Sciences. This was a recently formed team of senior stakeholders, a result of a large investment into Emmac Life Sciences.
We also worked closely with Pearlfisher, a very well known brand design agency which Emmac had appointed to help establish brand strategy.
Discovery
We interviewed representative samples of Blossom Swiss’s target audience and also non-users of CBD, and we found a lower knowledge of CBD across all participants than expected, including participants that actually advocated CBD usage as part of a lifestyle.
We found that users felt the site lacked a significant amount of content to take the user through the conversion funnel, offering only two pages of informative content; about Blossom Swiss and About CBD.
The majority of users were not happy to find visual references to cannabis leaves as it conveyed negative connotations; while there was an understanding that CBD products were derived from hemp plants, displaying an icon of a cannabis leaf or even showing a hemp farm as a background image pushed the site towards the grey area of CBD legality and introduced an almost ‘shady back alley’ feeling.
Solution
I decided to introduce a fixed left hand navigation to the design, with the navigation link colours inverting when overlaid on a hero image. This really helped in delivering a lifestyle experience, as it allowed for full screen, rich media to take centre stage. Large, rich content blocks were also used for product collection and article links, each providing a short caption with the link as if a friend were recommending the next steps.
I spent a lot of time designing and testing the product pages. There was a serious amount of information to communicate with the user on these pages, so I opted for a parallax design which allowed me to drip feed information in a staggered and digestible approach. As the user travelled down the page, the product imagery also responded to complement the text the user had just be shown, such as morphing into animation showing a CBD dropper over a tongue for the How To Use section.
The rest of the site design evolved quite quickly from the design of these two pages.
The hero experience optimised for mobile devices
Delivery
The team and I were really happy with the working prototype we delivered to the team at Emmac. Emmac and Pearlfisher both provided greet feedback, and the design was developed.
Unfortunately, a week before the scheduled launch date, and after development and UAT, Emmac contacted Pearlfisher and the agency with instruction to rebrand and subsequently redesign the website, citing a new direction from their leadership team. In the end, a more industry standard brand and website were launched.
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