Dryft
eCommerce
UX Design
Making eCommerce work for the Swedish handyman industry
In an industry slow to adapt to digital innovation, Stockholm-based handyman company - Dryft faced several major UX challenges on its path to digital maturity. While the company was making strategic investments in its digital experiences, marketing and partner collaborations, little attention had been given to the design thinking required to truly unlock handyman services to online consumers. During my time with Dryft, I explored several research and concept development avenues to identify and address some of their biggest challenges.
*Note: prior to this project I co-led a rebrand with Dryft, brand book can be found here.
Identifying and Addressing Key UX Challenges
Through engaging stakeholders in the business, researching competitors and ecommerce leaders, and current-state design and analytics audits, I was able to identify several major areas where strategically-aligned improvements could be made to the current website experience. My work focused on UX best practices, modernising the existing UI, and exploring solutions to the industry-specific challenge of balancing intuitive navigation and complex configurability for a large and incredibly diverse service catalogue - something Dryft's competitors also struggled with. Concluding my internship, I presented my research and key recommendations to business leaders, along with prototypes that demonstrated solutions in action.
Dryft is a Stockholm-based handyman scale-up pioneering eCommerce, digitised customer journeys and sustainable services within the Swedish handyman industry. Seeking to capitalise on the EU's emerging green economy, Dryft aims to bridge the gap between the existing conventional experiences and expectations of the handyman industry and those of a sustainable future empowered by digital innovation and service excellence.
To capture the existing and emerging markets for handyman services, Dryft is growing and driving innovations across three business channels: eCommerce, traditional, and energy renovations. Key developments include educational content creation, increased digitisation of customer journeys, and building a customer ecosystem through which personalised value can be delivered over lifelong relationships.
Poorly executed palette
A challenging colour palette with few optimal combinations / proportions has been adopted. Colour proportions are varied throughout, often with unbalanced and irritating results.
Inconsistent application of visual hierarchy and UI principles
Some pages are well-designed while others feel disorganised and cluttered. Repetitive elements like ratings, FAQs, and generic content appear too frequently, detracting from the user experience and burying more important information.
The global menu provides only a limited overview of services, and the navigation design is inconsistent at deeper levels, often burying essential links. Lack of persistent navigation tools like a breadcrumb bar or master services list forces users into a frustrating trial-and-error process to locate services within the site's convoluted structure.
Inconsistent conversion pathways and methods
At present there is no unified browsing and purchase flow for all available services. Pathways towards conversion are unconstrained and complicated by the existing architecture and navigation design.
Not strategically aligned
Ultimately, the current design does not align with Dryft's digital strategy - lacking the architecture, critical capabilities, integrations, and overall design maturity needed to deliver the calibre of digitised customer experience they have envisioned. This gap is however understood by the company and is a major driver of ongoing development efforts.
Summary
Conclusions
Ultimately, Dryft's analytics approach was sufficient but incomplete, meeting only the current needs of the business. As the company grows, the demand for reliable, high-quality metrics to provide visibility and support decisions in business, SEO, marketing, and design will increase. Dryft will need to expand its analytical scope and complexity to meet this demand.
The current analytics provided little insight on user behaviours, pain points, and mental models, which are crucial to a redesign. Such insights should therefore be obtained through extensive user research and testing.
Summary
Observing existing exemplary designs from eCommerce leaders and competitors provided valuable insights into effective navigation, complex configurability, and contemporary UI design - three principle areas that Dryft was not yet executing well. This research highlighted best practices in handling large and diverse catalogues, displaying relevant content, and applying modern design principles. Below are images and comments from some of the websites that I assessed.
Observations
Leading eCommerce websites such as IKEA and Zalando show that as catalogue scale and diversity increase, intuitive architecture and navigation are prioritised, with individual product page designs kept uniform and with limited configurability. Conversely - bespoke, small-catalogue retailers (eg high-end mountain bikes) can offer a high degree of customisation on their limited product range without complicating the overall user experience.
The challenge for Dryft, with its large and diverse catalogue of uniquely configurable services - is achieving powerful navigation and high configurability while remaining intuitive and minimally taxing to users. Built off the existing eCommerce architecture of their parent company (Clas Ohlson), Clas Fixare may be the best example of a handyman company achieving both. This design however has its limitations, and should not necessarily be copied verbatim.
Conclusions
To build their own navigation and configuration experience, Dryft should take inspiration from eCommerce leaders and handyman competitors, however ultimately any new architecture must be derived from user research, and refined through testing. Given the largely immature current state of eCommerce for the handyman industry, Dryft must do the hard work of understanding user desires, pain points and mental models in order to build the future conventional experience for this industry.
Moving towards a mature eCommerce experience will eventually also include the addition of features such as quote and booking management, and separate guest / member purchase flows - features also identified in the review. Additionally, adopting modern, clean design elements and high-quality content from industry leaders could further enhance Dryft’s digital experience.
Dryft’s existing digital enterprise was equal parts good and bad - including a burgeoning but still revolutionary eCommerce experience for the handyman industry, award-winning SEO, and yet majorly falling short of observed design best-practice. Dryft still had many problems to address in future designs - particularly IA, navigation and complex configurability as noted in earlier sections. Other factors were however equally as important to their aim of digital maturity and industry-leadership, such as building out their new customer platform, improving content quality and organisation, improving the website UI, increasing their analytical scope and quality, and much more.
While only really scratching the surface, the reviews, analyses and research I undertook helped to identify key issues and rough out the shape of Dryft’s future design requirements - something that can only be validated and further refined through a much larger, longer-term UX design effort. Below are the key UX challenges that I outlined to Dryft.
Prototypes
Borrowing from IKEA's global menu design, I have adopted a similarly clean design that offers powerful navigation options through a combination of a banner menu and slide-in modal. At the highest level the design is simple yet preserves access to essential links and three methods of navigating Dryft's complex service catalogue: "Browse by: Profession, Service, or Room / Area ". User burden is reduced by only revealing deeper navigation levels as a user proceeds down a given pathway. Logo and colours from the previous rebrand with Dryft have been adopted.
Simplified banner design with essential links displayed. More options are accessible via the menu icon, which triggers a slide-in modal.
Clicking the menu icon activates a slide-in menu modal containing essential links and offering multiple ways to navigate services. Clicking on a given option will reveal secondary and tertiary menus. At the furthest level of navigation within this menu, a text link to "see all services" will direct users to a primary service page that contains the full catalogue for that given service. Different menu states are shown above - from right to left: Primary menu, "Browse by Profession", "Browse by Room/Area", "Browse by Service"
Revised layout presenting key elements in a clean and organised way. The layout considers diminishing user engagement deeper into the page and prioritises essential links and content towards the top. Bento style design increases user delight and reduces burden, increasing headroom for deeper engagement with what is understandably a complex service.
A loan calculator module is included - connecting the energy renovation journey to external green financing / energy rating services Dryft is partnering with.
Rebrand is implemented in the visual design and TOV of copy.
Dynamic search field
Primary service categories and other critical links always accessible
Quote-builder link included
New branding adopted
Research is critical. With significant investment required to redesign and "level-up" the entire digital experience of a business, validating and refining design scope with customer research is incredibly important. In retrospect it may have been more valuable to focus on driving customer research over activities such as concept development (even if other aspects of my research pointed to potentially viable concepts).
One designer can’t do it all. In retrospect, picking a single focus (such as customer research) and going deep with it may have been a better approach with my limited time at the internship. My work did however provide a valuable holistic perspective on current issues and design priorities to guide future UX work.
Confused? Go agile. While I engaged with leaders in the business many times to ensure my objectives were relevant and processes on track, this could have been made more productive through adopting an agile mindset and methodologies. An agile approach would have provided task structure and prioritisation that would have greatly benefitted me in Dryft's busy scale-up environment, where access to key stakeholders was limited.
All this has to be tested. As with the research, testing of new designs is another crucial step that I did not have time to carry out. Through my work it became apparent that the single biggest problem to tackle was maintaining a positive and frustration-free user experience while achieving effective navigation and configurability of Dryft's large and diverse catalogue. While my prototypes demonstrated in-part what a solution may look like, I would have wanted to undertake the customer interviews and testing that could then validate an effective architecture to carry forward into UI development.