Combining Yeo’s vibrant narrative with its popular Yeokens loyalty platform
Type
Brand, loyalty platform
Status
Released
Timeframe
September 2023 - August 2024
At a glance
My contribution
Led the strategy of audits and playback sessions
Facilitated a user journey and content workshop
Crafted a new IA, upheld by an experience narrative
Designed detailed solutions to solve key challenges
Supported production throughout build
The team
Product Manager
Creative Developer
Software Engineer
Product Designer
UX Designer
Head of Product Strategy
Head of Technology
In its 30-year history, Yeo Valley has upheld a colourful brand based on the delicate balance between nature and good food. Now backed by its popular Yeokens loyalty platform, the time had come to regenerate its online experience.
Our agency was tasked with appreciating Yeo’s values and emphasising its fun and colour with a refined look and feel. Most importantly, the experience needed to integrate Yeokens with a clear brand narrative—something which was seen as missing by the Yeo marketing team.
Challenges
Our first draft of a solution didn't excite the team at Yeo enough. We needed to inject more character and ambition into our designs. We responded by building clear sentiments that the design needed to deliver at each stage of the user journey. This narrative enabled lateral thinking, which took us in the right direction.
Outcomes
13%
Increase in registrations after 1 month
33%
Increase in points banking YoY
By simplifying the site's structure, we created a narrative that upheld Yeo's content strategy. The bold yet spacious designs allowed the brand's colorful nature to shine through. These two elements delivered a notable increase in engagement—crucial for Yeo's retention strategy.
The plan: examine the sum of parts, connect the pieces, and create clear user journeys—making Yeo's content part of something greater.
Before starting with us, the team at Yeo had an idea of what was limiting the current experience. Everything that Yeo had created was made with the idea that the user should be immersed in their brand story. This meant that their focus was on the build-up of lots of individual pieces of content. Before appointing us, they had realised that this approach had eventually led to the experience becoming over saturated.
Yeo was also aware that their popular Yeokens loyalty platform was detached from the experience. Users were not actually engaging further than collecting points and redeeming prizes. This was a problem as Yeokens is a large contributor to brand power. If left detached from the rest of the brand, it’s potential would be capped.
We needed to install a strategy for taking care of what the sum of parts looked like for the user. We had to surface a clear user journey for content and narrative to become coherent.
The previous experience was limited by a lack of narrative and layouts that failed to enhance the brand's character.
A problem with many solutions.
As we were aware that the new experience would need to wrap around the existing content it made sense to start out journey with a UX audit. This would lead into a one day workshop with Yeo to pitch our view of what could be improved.
Discovery deck presented to Yeo Valley during a one day workshop
Our first draft of a new structure was led by semantics—but this didn’t excite the team at Yeo. We had to try something different. So we took a step back, and created a narrative to blend logic with character.
An experience narrative would give Yeo something they hadn't had before—a meaningful structure for all their efforts to fit into.
An internal workshop brought together our focus on how the narrative could be prioritised and communicated. We then divided this up into four key milestones for the user experience to hinge on: inform, educate, engage, and entertain.
After iterating on this with the team at Yeo, we could effectively group content and features into each milestone—generating a new IA to bring the narrative to life.
This narrative, along with representations of the proposed navigation, got the team at Yeo on board with our efforts. The narrative made it a lot easier for us to be creative and for the strategy to be understood.
Experience narrative, showing proposed milestones for the user journey. This was backed by strategic findings from Yeo’s own marketing and product research.
Early wireframes visualising the proposed navigation. We learnt that this was a much more effective vessel for articulating our design decisions to the team at Yeo than the raw sitemap.
Desires and reality
Although ambitions were high, project constraints were now brought to the front and centre of our work—affecting what could be realistically achieved.
The new sitemap would need to solve the conflict of a desire to evolve the experience and a need to respect limited resources.
We collaborated as a team to find a number of viable structural compromises. At the heart of this challenge was the need to eliminate product detail pages. This called for some early interaction design efforts to shape how Yeo's products could be presented in a small space.
While an overlay could help maintain simplicity, we decided to use interactions within the product card itself to reveal nutritional and ingredient information. Grouping these product cards together in a "jumbo" carousel would complement the character behind the products.
Wireframes detailing the approach for flattening product listing and detail pages
For the time being, we needed to get a job done with the resources we had. Having examined all the variables in detail, there was a clear vision for what this could be in 5 years: an immersive dive into all things Yeo Valley, with a Yeokens 'economy' at its heart.
Seeing it through
The build was still ambitious, even though we had drawn back a few ambitions. In limiting page templates, some tricky font and back-end work was needed to complete the experience. Highly detailed wireframes and explorations of complexities before scoping build helped us to break down and chunk the effort to get to launch.
A lasting design effort was required to get through late-arriving challenges, including changing business requirements and revisits of agreed tactics.
The structure now supports a clear narrative and Yeo have an experience they can continue to grow with fun and engaging content
Having been a long journey of planning, refinement, and delivery—there were only high spirits when we deployed the new experience.
The dust is still settling from this achievement; however, the launch received some direct feedback from customers, who cited the improved navigation and look and feel as elevating their experience. There are some key measures that need to be examined in the long run, particularly to observe if the new top-down strategy can continue to hold together Yeo's content.
At this stage, we believe that there are only too many ideas to take the experience forward. The fairest next step should be to explore these strategically, particularly by talking to Yeokens advocates and non-advocates.
