Guiding Contura: A Research Journey for selling wood stoves
Helping Contura with insights from buyers and existing customers, and providing recommendations for further development.
Contura is a company specializing in wood-burning stoves. With a big variety and product range from small to large stoves. Our task was to test the usability of the website when going through the purchasing flow. And also the findability for their own developed purchasing guide and 3D customizer.
We had some expectations that the project would give valuable insights for both us and the stakeholders, since Contura had never done tests before, only surface level with basic data showing visitors and some heatmaps.
We wanted to give them options on how to improve their own tools, like 3D customizer and the purchasing guide. They had been putting in alot of hours of development but did not know if they were even used.
Proccess and Outcome
We started out the project by looking at two target groups – consumers and retailers, and Contura had the responsibility to reach out and recruit users from each group. Two different qualitative methods were used for the interviews, the consumers shared screen while thinking aloud, doing chosen tasks with pre-built scenarios. The scenarios were based on webanalysis and purpose of use. The tests were divided into mobile test and desktop.
Retailers were interviewed in a context based manner, they got to speak about how the meetings with customers are done, and their different interactions through out the buying process. And the usage of Conturas own sales channel. Interviews were done on Teams and in person at the store.
When the interviews and tests were conducted, the material was analyzed. We clustered the insights and created based on the theme for each page/functional test. The tests gave us insights in areas such as information architecture and functions, interface design and content.
Based on the insights, recommendations are delivered on elements and parts to keep, which worked particularly well, as well as on further insight work and concrete tips on changes to the interface for increased user experience. Through the context-based interviews, we were also able to develop a customer journey for purchase and provide recommendations on the synergies of the different sales channels.
