Website prototype and positioning for a furniture brand

LE-INVENTOR

Design scoping

Design leadership

Strategy

LeInventor is a niche kitchen collection, designed and sold in the Baltic States.

To help test the feasibility of the product in the expanded EU market, I developed the business strategy, defined the design scope, and lead the design of the website prototype.

About the project

View prototype in Figma

The creative process

Strategy & discovery

The business

LeInventor is a company that designs and sells kitchen collections, with specially equipped modules—for improved organization and storage.

Watch the promotional video

The business model

During the meetings with the business owners, we sketched the provisional business operation model in the expanded market. I learned about the sales logistics and the involved parties and gained first insights into the website's audience and purpose.

LeInventor's team remotely assists clients and coordinates order fulfillment. They support the dealer network with knowledge and training.

Manufacturing partners produce, pre-assemble, pack, and deliver the product components to the dealers.

Dealership partners provide design services to clients, deliver the product on-site and manage the installation process.

LeInventor

Manufacturers

Dealers

Idea

Testing

Scaling

Maturity

Problem to solve

Several LeInventor kitchens were designed, sold, and manufactured within the Baltic countries. The product received positive feedback and even praise from the customers. The website was required to gain insights into the advantageous export market geography—to help direct the development of the services, new relationship building, and marketing efforts.

Business maturity

LeInventor website's initial objective was to help test the product feasibility in the export market and eventually progress the business to the scaling phase.

Context

• Lots of images of the product
• Close-ups showing features
• Drawings showing application
• Materials gallery
• Catalogues with specs
• Available services
• Where/how to buy

2

Decide

Convince

• Project gallery
• About the company
• News & events
• Virtual showroom
• Manufacturing process
• Certificates & awards

3

TRUST

Convert

• Schedule appt in the showroom
• Request information
• Brochure download
• Vector files download
• Request assistance or live chat
• Kitchen planning quiz
• Planning checklist download

4

ACT

• To find information about the product, services, and the company

Purpose

1

Decide

Competitor overview

I overviewed the competitors' websites to examine and comprehend the purpose of the content and features. I organized the gathered info in a consequential form, showcasing a broad user's path—from deciding whether a product meets their needs to acting.

• Product buyers—apartment and house owners looking to renovate their kitchen
• Landowners looking to build new homes from scratch

Home owners

Architects

• Buyer representatives—architects and interior designers working on the residential interior project for a client, including the kitchen area

Kitchen designers

Target audience

I defined the website user groups, basing them on the business operations model and the insights drawn from the competitor analysis.

Age 27-55
Women 70%, Men 30%
Higher education
High income

Age: 30-50
Gender: Any
The company owner
5+ years in the industry

• Dealers—kitchen showroom owners and kitchen designers, looking to expand their product offering to buyers

User research

I put the focus on getting the insights from the buyers. Knowing what they might look for, I have come up with the interview questions. LeInventor's team reached out to past clients, to facilitate the interviewees' recruitment process.

Context

Defined user value

I explained the goal of the conversation to the interviewees: “We are creating a website for a kitchen collection, and would like to hear about your experience with similar websites”. I talked with the homeowners and interior designers, seven people in total.

Users expect the website to be rich in imagery—photos and drawings. The visual content is crucial to help the users decide to take action. Most buyers would like to get information about the purchasing process and understand the price range of the product.

Download user research report

The business owners wanted to test the product in the new markets while having little delivery experience, no showrooms, and no relationships with sales dealers. I had to think of an ethical way to engage the users to take action on the website—to collect the data about the most prospective market geography.

Delivering value ethically

Small portfolio

Solution: Create the product 3D visuals in different room layouts and styles to demonstrate possibilities.

Solution: Allow leaving the contact info to get notified when the showroom opens nearby.

No showrooms

No dealers

Solution: Allow leaving information about the user's location to request contact from the dealer nearby.

Building empathy

Impact

What tangible impact do we have on peoples' lives?

• HELPS TO CREATE SERENE HOME ENVIRONMENTS
• HELP PEOPLE ENJOY LIVING THEIR LIVES, BEING FULLY PRESENT

How we speak

How do we want to sound when we communicate?

• INFORMATIVE
• EDUCATED
• RESPECTFUL
• TO-THE-POINT

• ACCOMPLISHED
• QUALITY OVER QUANTITY
• STRIVES FOR ORDERLINESS
• MATURE
• OPEN-MINDED

What qualities do our customers share?

Target audience

Feeling

How do the people feel after being in contact with us?

• REASSURED
• DELIGHTED
• CALM
• HAPPY

I held a workshop with the stakeholders, where we brainstormed ideas about the LeInventor brand. Our goal was to create an empathic connection with the product end-users, the homeowners.

The brand

Unique kitchens, designed
for keeping the clutter away

Fast, simple and collaborative
ordering process

Custom product,
done to expectations

The X-factor

How LeInventor is different from other brands? Together with the owners, we have singled out three key elements.

The mission statement

LeInventor's mission is to help people maintain order in their kitchens, homes, and minds. We use technology for simple ordering process to create kitchens, done exactly to clients' expectations.

I constructed website user personas—to create the images of the real people in the minds of the project participants. This approach shifted the perspective from the business goals to the user needs.

The depicted personality traits and device use preferences served as base points for the website requirements.

Personas

Download persona profiles

Website scope

Gathering possibilities

We brainstormed a list of possible website features and content, relying on the insights and decisions made in the strategy phase. I labeled each option according to its place in the user decision path—from the evaluation process to taking action.

To facilitate the collaboration process and trim down the feature and content options, I organized a "cards game”. Each participant had a "budget to spend" on the options thought to be the most important and feasible ones.

Prioritization

Content & features ideas

I described the interactions and interrelations of the features and set the requirements for browser and OS compatibility, creating a textual agreement about what had to be designed.

I mapped out a plan for content creation—described the content pieces by context, type, format, size, and quantity. I defined the level of client involvement in the content creation process.

Functional specification

I created an outline for user testing after the website launch—including a usability survey to gather feedback and a plan for testing the website for errors and functionality flukes.

Content specification

Planing for user testing

Documentation

Content drafting

I created a list of essential points for each written content piece—within the defined context. I composed the draft versions of the titles and formed the early versions of call-to-actions—while keeping the user goals and needs in mind.

Information architecture

The IA model

We discussed the IA model with the project participants to get everybody on board regarding the website's structural foundation.

I distributed the content and features into categories, labeled them with clear and descriptive phrases, and created a hierarchical tree model. I aimed to put the most relevant content at easy reach and apply the principle of progressive disclosure.

Switching to visual language

I sketched the website interface page by page, transforming the draft content and feature descriptions into a graphic form. I focused on finding the best visual solutions to present the content in a way that would make the users pay attention to the right things at the right moment.

Wireframing

I created the visual hierarchy by playing with the size and the distribution of the elements on the page. As a final step, I confirmed the sketches with the owner and the back-end developer.

UX content writing

I created a brand vocabulary and included the humanized industry terms, to effectively explain the product to the users. I wrote the text for the website, using the terms and the brand voice, to craft an informative and engaging read.

I created visual consistency between parts of the website, and added affordances and noticeable distinctions for interactive elements. Organized the visual information within the grid, creating a hierarchy by aligning, proximating, repeating, and contrasting.

UX prototype

View Figma prototype

UI style board

Crafted a style board for the website user interface by choosing a color palette and a font pair. Set an aesthetic direction for the visual content, namely interior renderings and photography. Designed the interface elements—such as buttons, links, and forms. This direction was to be picked by the UI designers further down the line.

Further development

I handed over the prototype, and the mood board to the UI designers to create the desktop interface and extrapolate it to smaller screens. The designers worked alongside visual content creator, front-end and back-end developers, under my guidance.