bol.com

With over 9 million customers and an annual revenue of 1.2 billion euros, bol.com is the biggest ecommerce platform of the Netherlands and Belgium. In 2018 I was appointed as Lead Designer, on behalf of Soda/Resoluut, to contribute to the growth and the optimization of bol.com’s iOS and Android apps.

The challenge
bol.com, sometimes called the Amazon of the Benelux, currently has over 16 million products, works together with external sellers and offers several subscription services.

Being the biggest ecommerce platform of the Netherlands and Belgium, bol.com introduced its mobile app for both iOS as Android back in 2014. With more and more customers using their smartphone to shop online, bol.com wanted to offer a native, mobile experience that would make mobile shopping just as easy as on desktop. However, in the years that followed, the app never really secured the intended influence both internally as on the market.

With as goal to improve both the UX as the UI of the app in order to secure more (mobile) influence, bol.com worked together with digital agency Soda/Resoluut, on whose behalf I started working for bol.com. My job was to contribute to the further improvements and growth of the app.

The process
I was being tasked with leading and delegating all app related design efforts, as well as optimizing internal workflows. With seperate iOS/Android development teams each with their own sprints, I proposed for the design team to use the Kanban framework. It also allowed us to keep working on future design updates while being flexibly available for the development teams. Through several changes in the way of working and by setting up a consistent design library we were able to improve the collaboration with the development teams and to increase the velocity of the design team.

Projects for the design team were either based on business goals or user feedback. I was in charge of delegating specific projects to the right specialist - sometimes a project was as small as a visual update of a certain page, in some cases a project turned into an epic and was about optimizing a core flow in the app. One example was the in-app chat, which received negative user feedback. I was in charge of optimizing the flows, testing the new proposals and iterating based on the newly received feedback.

Video about the new bol.com app by Soda/Resoluut.

Besides supervising and initiating design projects, such as the in-app live chat, improvements for the search/browse flow and rethinking the product detail page, I have also been involved with improving the webshop and worked closely together with the other design teams.

The result
After introducing the new bol.com app we have seen a considerable increase of mobile users. As of 2018, the app is the market leader in retail in terms of reach.

The reach of the app has increased with more than 220% in the past 2 years and it has an average rating of 4.5 stars in both the App Store and Google Play, based on over 100,000 reviews. With the redesign, the app got its intended influence - not only on the market but also internally. With the introduction of the new visual style of the app and dozens of new features, the aim is to make the app even bigger in 2019.