Cool Cats Co: How Small Changes Led to Big Results

A Family Business

For over half a century, Cool Cats Co.* has been a cherished family-owned flower shop nestled in a charmingPacific Northwest town. Loved by the community, this floral oasis caters to a vast array of occasions, offering an impressive selection of roses, arrangements, and gifts. The owners, a husband and wife team, are passionate about roses and take pride in their quality product coupled with exceptional customer service

Obstacles to Overcome

Their antiquated website failed to excite potential customers and could not keep up with the competition. Prior to Designed by Cats involvement,Cool Cats Co. rose to the occasion and updated their website, but it still fell short. In the redesigned layout their long time customers were blindsided by the redesign, and couldn’t find beloved categories and products anymore. This caused an increase in complaints to customer service and a reduction in online orders from long time customers. Heirloom roses immediately rolled back the old website design. That’s when we were asked to step in. 

Research

We started with the research, and we found out that the majority of their customers were above the age of 65, and they aren’t getting younger. According to the National Library of Medicine, approximately6% of people 65+ experience some kind of vision loss. Then at 85years old, that number triples to about 18%. Someone’s vision can be impacted by a variety of factors. For example, the color contrast on the website plays a major role as some people may develop colorblindness in their later years. Keeping this in mind, we prioritized a design strategy to make the website more accessible to their audience.

Improving the Customer Experience

Instead of reverting to their previous layout, we modernized it for peak accessibility and a better user experience. First, we enlarged the search bar and included the word “search” rather than just the magnifying glass. This is important because generationally, a magnifying glass means something different to non-digital natives.

Similarly, we changed the color contrast ratio of darker and lighter colors so different aspects of the website became more noticeable. Then, we focused on displaying one major image, video, or paragraph to highlight and draw attention to it. At the same time, we also included a peek at content down below to draw viewers further in.Most importantly we kept the same navigation hierarchy that their long time customers were used to - this helped reduce the learning curve, so returning customers can still find their favorite categories.

*This client wished to remain anonymous so every instance of their name has been replaced with “Cool Cats Co.” to fulfill their request.