Putting the Woo! in WooCommerce
The team at Ready, Steady, Paint! recognised that the emphasis in schools on art and other creative subjects has been showing a steady decline in recent years. They decided to take matters into their own hands to educate and inspire the next generation of artists by developing a monthly art subscription box, which gives kids aged 6-11 access to high-quality art materials and expert tuition via online video tutorials. They asked us to help them bring the concept to life.
Initial Designs
We were given an initial set of website visuals and a basic tech spec to work with. Our brief was to map the user journey in more detail and work the mood board designs into a full suite of responsive GUIs. As well as refining the visual style itself and bringing in the Chameleo family mascots, we made top-level CRO recommendations, such as adding in USPs to increase trust and credibility. We also worked closely with the team to improve the user experience throughout the subscription process and inside the member account area.
Responsive Visuals
Our user research at the project outset identified that it would be especially important for the site to be optimised for tablet screens (as this is the most popular device for parent-child online learning resources like this), so we adopted a mobile-first approach for the public-facing pages as well as the account area. This enabled us to move seamlessly from design into development as we had already considered the user experience across various devices.
Extra Incentives
The post-launch strategy revolved around engaging early adopters and getting them to promote the platform for us. We included a recommend-a-friend programme for parent members (offering a discount against future boxes) and a reward points scheme to allow children to earn badges by sharing their progress, uploading their artwork to the clubhouse gallery and sharing via social media.
Technical Considerations
Our research also identified that a Ready, Steady, Paint! art box subscription would be a popular gift, for example, from grandparents to grandchildren. Therefore, we built a gifting option into the WooCommerce subscription functionality that would allow grandparents to buy the initial subscription then transfer account ownership to a child’s parent.
SEO was also a major factor, so we partnered with our friends at Footprint Digital to conduct a pre-launch audit. We then worked the insights gleaned from this audit into the site content to ensure we’d be launching with an optimised platform to build upon.
We also had to create a custom integration with the client’s legacy Order Management System. This integration was used to trigger system emails alongside the bespoke MailChimp automations we had created to enhance the user experience.
As we were dealing with young subscribers, a final consideration was account security. Potential vulnerabilities were identified and discussed to ensure we implemented the most robust solution possible and the entire data comms workflow has been fully encrypted.
Ready, Steady, Go!
The site was soft launched in May 2019 and is rapidly gathering momentum, with more than 100 active subscribers tuning in for bi-monthly video tutorials. We’re very proud to have played a part in inspiring the next generation of young artists and are looking forward to developing the MVP platform even further!