Problem

With Summer approaching, Bunnings was looking for something fresh and engaging to elevate its brand perception and help boost engagement with a limited-time outdoor furniture campaign. So an Augmented Reality app was the order of the day; a way to let customers single-handedly preview and shop furniture from the comfort of their home, and share renders of their vision with their loved ones. But, being a limited-time ‘pop-up’ product – the project had a limited scope, with no API integrations, no way to display prices dynamically, and only able to display a total of 80 products. Building the app in Unity presented another unique set of constraints which I worked closely with the developers to understand and work with.

Approach

Competitor research gave us a quick insight into what had been done before – both good and bad. Next, our team of 2 developers, 1 Industrial Designer, and I worked closely to pool our knowledge of best practice UX and usability to not only aspire to be the best in class – but also avoid features we didn’t like in our competitors’ products. Some concepts, such as IA, pattern libraries, and personalization were akin to a typical app or web build. Other considerations, such as ‘how to prevent customers from losing their placed product in a 3D space’ were unique to the AR concept. We guerilla tested our prototype early and often and designed it with the Bunnings target market in mind – erring on the side of simplicity and getting customers into the AR experience in as few taps as possible.

Value delivered

Over the course of the project, my team and I worked closely with our stakeholders to meet and exceed their expectations and the result was an app that received an average rating of 4.8 stars in the App Store and Google Play. This is owed largely to the incredible brand loyalty Bunnings has earned over the years, but our animated tutorials, easy single-handed operation, intuitive UI copy, and clutter-free interface certainly helped add a level of polish that will help Bunnings stay atop the list of Australia’s most loved brands.
Services provided
// Stakeholder alignment
// Competitor landscape analysis
// Opportunity identification
// Information Architecture design
// UX Design
// UI Design
// Prototyping
*Detailed deliverables available on request