JB Hi-Fi Epic Gift Guide

During the UX strategy phase of this project, we recognised that as an exploratory gift shopping experience it had to be really easy for a user to go back and forth between the gift guide and product pages, without losing their place.

For example, if a user was on the “Gifts for dad” page and clicked through to view a product halfway down the page, it was highly likely they would then want to go back and view other gift idea suggestions with as little friction as possible.

Enter the “blades” – a concept we designed that enables the viewer to click into a product and have this content open over the top of the current page, then easily close and go back without losing their place. The blades concept allows the user to go many layers deep into the site – for example open a product category, then a product, then a related product – then again easily close these windows and go back and pickup where they left off.

As the JB marketing team were already tasked with managing the main eCommerce website on a day to day basis, they were keen to minimise double entering of product data wherever possible.

With this in mind, they asked if we could build an automated data feed to help keep the new gift guide website up to date, but with a catch – there was no formal data feed functionality available – only a .csv product report they receive each day via email, as an attachment.

True to the Scratch ethos, our response was of course “we’ll figure something out”.
So we went to work developing a script to extract the email attachment, transpose the data into the appropriate format, then run some checks and balances before running an update on the gift guide website database.

The result – a very happy marketing team!

As the gift guide website was designed to serve as a landing point for a number of concurrent Christmas campaigns (both digital and traditional channels), it was vital that there was sufficient server resource in place to deal with the large influx of traffic.

Although the Scratch hosting environment is setup to cater for high traffic websites – and we run advanced server caching as standard – we wanted to make absolutely sure that every user had a super fast experience, so covered our bases by providing a dedicated performance upgrade for the campaign period.