Using Inclusive Design to Increase Sales
- Inclusion
Who does this case study involve?
- Cambridge Engineering Design Centre, University of Cambridge, UK
- Unilever, Leatherhead, England, UK
The case
The case study focuses on exploring the benefits of using an inclusive design approach to drive an increase in sales. It looks at activities that were conducted with Unilever to improve the visual layout and content used in their e-Commerce systems. Specifically, the ice cream brand, Magnum, is one of Unilever’s billion-dollar brands that implemented this inclusive review on their e-Commerce websites. Before this process, the default form of product images was a photograph of the product where it was difficult or impossible to discern key information from these images, particularly when they were being displayed on a small mobile screen. With an increasing amount of e-Commerce transactions being conducted on mobile devices, this is an increasingly important issue. This issue is further exacerbated for people with any degree of vision loss including age-related long-sightedness.
The process involved developing guidelines for new sales images, and their layouts. These new images are digitally enhanced product images, specially designed for mobile e-commerce. They use digital representations of the product, sometimes enhanced with off-pack communications such as a square containing the product information. To choose the correct images and layouts a number of user trials were undertaken, resulting in over 3000 users being consulted in total.
To assess the effectiveness of the final chosen visual content, an 8-week live trial was conducted, comparing the old and new visual layouts, and the new one experienced a huge sales increase of 24% compared to the old one. This leads to a three-pronged approach to help advocate for the use of inclusive design practices in corporate settings. Those three elements are:
- Develop a proof-of-concept prototype of a better solution that demonstrates in a tangible way that something better is possible.
- Enable business stakeholders to experience the issue, and the difference that the prototype solution makes for them.
- Quantify the number of people that the issue effects, and quantify the extent to which the solution could reduce this number.
References
Goodman-Deane, J., Waller, S.D., Bradley, M., Clarkson, P.J. and Bradley, O., 2018. “Using inclusive design to drive usability improvements through to implementation”. In Breaking Down Barriers: Usability, Accessibility and Inclusive Design (pp. 65-75). Springer International Publishing.