Overview

UX/UI Design · 2018 · 4-week MVP sprint

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is the UK’s largest nature conservation charity. I was brought in as part of a cross-functional team to redesign their e-commerce shop — creating a responsive, brand-aligned experience that would drive revenue, attract new customers, and work seamlessly across all devices.

Team: 3 UX Designers · 3 Front-end Developers · 2 Back-end Developers · 2 QA · 1 Project Manager
My Role: UX Research · Interaction Design · UI Design · Design System
Tools: Sketch · InVision · Hotjar · Adobe Photoshop · Trello · Slack

The Challenge

The brief was clear: design a responsive e-commerce platform that increased revenue, attracted new customers, and aligned visually with the RSPB’s main site — bringing the warmth and essence of the brand into the shop experience.

The key tension was balancing a fast 4-week MVP sprint with the need to make evidence-based design decisions rather than assumptions.

Research & Discovery

To ground our decisions in real user needs, we ran a condensed on-site stakeholder workshop with representatives from content, sales, marketing, brand, business, and development — structured around Google Sprint principles. This gave us a shared understanding of short and long-term goals, and aligned the team quickly before a single pixel was designed.

We followed this with competitive and comparative analysis of the e-commerce landscape, and developed user personas and journey maps to capture the needs and frustrations of RSPB’s target audience.

Key goals that emerged:

Technical: Secure payment processing, responsive interface, full WCAG accessibility compliance

Business: Increase sales, enable cross-selling, improve performance across mobile and tablet

User: Quickly find and engage with products on any device

Design & Delivery

Working across the full responsive stack — mobile, tablet, and desktop — I was responsible for:

• Defining the information architecture and user flows for the homepage, product detail pages, and checkout journey
• Producing wireframes and interactive prototypes in Sketch and InVision
• Leading usability testing to validate design decisions iteratively throughout the sprint
• Building out a design system (style guide and component library) aligned to the RSPB’s global brand, ensuring consistency across both the shop and the main site
• Using Hotjar to analyse user behaviour and identify friction points post-launch

Results

• Mobile traffic increased by 20%
• NPS score improved, with users responding positively to the redesigned experience
• The shop was brought fully in line with the main RSPB site, creating a seamless customer journey for members moving between the two