Who is the client?

The School of Life was founded in 2008 by philosopher Alain de Botton and other educators. It helps people develop their self-knowledge and emotional intelligence all around the world. Their lessons can take shape in a number of ways, such as books, workshops and a popular YouTube channel with over 4.5 million subscribers.

How can we improve their
e-commerce experience?

At first glance the website lookED spot on

Consistent branding, eye-catching visuals with their colourful yet minimal signature look. Our first impression was so striking, that it made us question at the beginning if the client actually needed help moving forward.

HOWEVER once we tested it…

The overall feedback we got from users pointed to a different reality. A reality where even though the website looks modern and approachable, the navigation is convoluted and the flow is not intuitive.

The Problem

Based on the TESTS findings we were able to establish our problem statement:

The School of Life e-commerce experience, although aesthetically pleasing, has a convoluted navigation and product description in place. This creates a negative impact on their user flow, product search and consequently on their online shopping transactions.

Time to understand how the users interact with the topics promoted by the school

USER INTERVIEW

We had a candid conversation about emotional intelligence, self-knowledge, mindfulness and fulfilment with a group of five users, where three of them were familiar with the brand. We also had the chance to speak in depth about user behaviour with one of them who works for The School of Life.

Our overall goal was to understand how users prefer to engage with such topics and apply the findings into the website to guarantee a more meaningful experience.

Our key takeaways were:

“Learning styles play a role when users are engaging with emotional intelligence topics”

– Life Coach (SME)

SURVEYS

We also ran a survey with 89 participants to quantify our research findings and ratify patterns that were brought to light during the user interview stage.

Our key validations were:

PERSONA DEVELOPMENT

Meet Andrew and Jane – our self-knowledge seekers that came to life based on the main research trends.

Value Proposition Canvas

It was also crucial for us to understand their pains, gains and take into consideration all these important information when ideating and designing on the next stage.

The Solution