Babyworld
BabyWorld is a chain that offers baby products through online sales and physical stores. Here you can find the trendiest and latest brands in baby products, toys, and clothes.
They want to show a great commitment where their goal is to exceed customer expectations with good service, knowledge, and fast deliveries. The problem was their outdated e-commerce site that desperately needed modernization. I was placed on the team set to make them shine again. However, this would not turn out the way I expected it to. Not at all.
Baby products online
I was new at the company and had only done one whole e-commerce site before. It was a lot of new things for me to get thrown into. So, with an outdated site in an old system, babyworld needed modernization. Both back-end and front-end. We started with three 4-hour long sessions with the customer to detail what needed to be done. Then to my surprise, I was asked to create a simple design for a main page and a product page, just simple you know.
The work
I felt this was a bit early for UI design and I didn’t have a lot of time either. Thankfully, it was well received by the customer. The customer didn’t like their brand guidelines and said I should look at the style on the current web. I tried to balance these two and also be a little creative with how it looked. I wanted it to represent the soul of the company and also not look too much like the competitors.
Many discussions were had where we talked about the details of a product page, there were many. In the following internal meetings, we iterated on the design. It now looked really good but I got the sense that the customer had liked the initial design a bit better. I also got the sense that team members were in it for themselves and not really working together. You could say that project management was lackluster too.
However, concept designs were made for selected pages for mobile and desktop.
Then it felt like I was not trusted when my design was verified by another designer without my knowledge. What the project manager didn’t realize was that I had already checked my design with other designers. In retrospect, it feels like there was a lack of communication between me and the project manager.
Unexpected endings
I was new at the company. On my third day, the CEO was fired. After a couple of weeks, one of the two guys who hired me decided to quit. Two weeks later the other guy also quit. So my two favorite colleagues disappeared. I had previously turned another job down while I got this one, I checked with them if they were still interested, and they were. That company is Nexer where I work today. And by the way, Babyworlds site actually turned out fine, check: babyworld.se
