Hobbycraft case study - Practicology

Practicology is now Pattern

Key Challenges

Our Approach

The Results

Hobbycraft is the largest arts and crafts retailer in the UK with more than 80 stores and a transactional website. Visits from tablets and smartphones to the desktop site were growing quickly. Hobbycraft tasked Practicology with creating a responsive web design, so a single site could better serve all devices and sizes of screen.

Hobbycraft’s objectives were outlined, target audiences identified and a content audit was conducted. At the same time user experience problems were identified on the existing site. The goal was to retrofit a responsive design to the current site, rather than completely redesign it.

The Practicology web design team then set to work to create the new designs, speeding up development with a framework for the website and breakpoints (the points at which the design of the website changes to optimise for different-sized screens).

The new design included space-saving yet easy-to-use drop-down menus that would work on all screen sizes. The team also used existing product images, using the highest resolution by default, and displayed optimised images for mobiles using an alternative content delivery network.

The site was built using HTML5 to allow for the latest browsers and mobile devices. The team went on to add support for IE8 to cater for the large number of customers still using it.

The website launched at the end of September 2014 and, comparing four weeks’ trading with the previous year, the results indicated the redesign has greatly improved the user experience. Results include:

Smartphone/mobile conversion rate up 90%
Tablet conversion up by 44%
Desktop conversion up 30% rise

Transactions and revenue also rose substantially for each device type, showing the direct connection between improving the usability of a site through responsive design, and improving its sales performance through all channels.

Econsultancy has highlighted Hobbycraft's responsive site as "massively simple to use" and says it gets the basics of ecommerce just right.

Since then, Hobbycraft has further engaged Practicology to continue to make improvements to the design of its new responsive site.

Testimonial

We identified more and more of our customers were shopping with us on mobile phones and tablets, but our website didn’t work well on a small screen. At Hobbycraft, we’re passionate about craft and creativity, and we want a website to match. Practicology was able to tackle our issues from end to end, designing a fully responsive template for our website that delivered great results right from the start.

Katherine Paterson – Customer Development Director – Hobbycraft

Your Challenges

How can I get more visitors to my site to actually spend money?

Services

Digital Design

Customer Experience

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Signup for Our Newsletter

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Insights

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Hobbycraft
Website design