Mittens & Max
Mittens & Max is a pet urn and memorial e-commerce site focused on redefining the way pets are remembered after they've passed.
Team: KRUTSCH Associates
Role: Lead UX Designer
FEATURE SET // WORKFLOW // UX RESEARCH // WIREFRAMES // UX DESIGN // ILLUSTRATION
The idea
The client has been serving families in the funeral business for nearly a century. Mittens & Max wanted their existing pet urn and memorial site to demonstrate a commitment to forging real connections with their customers with a site refresh driven by UX principles.
The client wanted to redesign and build upon their current Shopify ecommerce website to include empathetically-driven visual and written content.
The process
To better understand the e-commerce platform Mittens & Max’s shop used, research into what could be visually manipulated - and what could not - with custom code on the store was conducted. Working closely with a developer, site styles were updated with the assurance that code-modified portions of the site were still accessible and that copy and visuals could be updated by the client to match their growing product catalog.
Empathy-affirming content, like educational blog posts by experts and customer-submitted pet memorials, were to be incorporated into the site flow. The balance between these additional pieces and the shop portion of the site was achieved through iterative and collaborative wireframing with the client.
The client's existing visual language was expanded. Additional options were added to the primary color palette, and more illustrations of animals were drawn. Appropriate lifestyle photography was vital to the visual language and was more clearly defined. Mittens & Max sells urns and memorials meant only for pets; if the right photos of humans and their pets weren't used, customers may confuse pet urns as urns meant for humans. A catalog of stock photography was therefore carefully curated for further use on the site.
Iterations on the designs were conducted with Mittens & Max to incorporate the correct balance of product and visual engagement on the homepage.
The result
The final site includes updates to the site's global visual language, a completely reworked homepage, custom graphics, and more. Mittens & Max's new premium pet urn product line, Reflect & Remember, stand out from their other products with unique product pages and a custom collection landing page.
