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National Book Tokens (NBT) is the gift that has been inspiring book lovers since 1932. I fondly remember getting Book Tokens in birthday cards when I was growing up in the 80s (yes, I am that young), and we usually gift Book Tokens when our kids are invited to birthday parties.
A fantastic gift of choice for all ages.
NBT has a relatively new product, Bookily, which enables you to send an NBT gift card to someone, and have it automatically topped up each month, so the lucky recipient can choose a new book every month.
The gift that keeps on giving.
Again, it’s a fantastic gift of choice for all ages; getting younger readers into the habit of reading regularly, and helping satiate those teens and adults with a voracious appetite for consuming the written word.
NBT believes in it. Bravand believes in it. People that buy it seem to love it. So let's get more people subscribing!
We met with the fantastic Josie McGhee, Product Manager, and Petros Matos, Ecommerce Manager, at NBT and got our brief, then it was over to Bravand's all-round UX-wonder, Alexa Sielaff to perform one of her, now legendary, roasts on Bookily.
A roast sees Alexa audit the site from a user experience perspective. This reveals all sorts of issues and snags, for example:
- Too much effort placed on the user to figure out what this thing is and what it does
- Too much going off on one page
- Too much text / crammed together / too small
- Calls to action not clear enough / Too many calls to action / Calls to action too early on the page
That sort of thing. These roasts can be brutal, but they need to be heard and, more importantly, acted upon.
In NBT’s case, the outputs of Alexa’s roast formed an initial discussion document that we took back to Josie and Petros. A good deal of what we were thinking was already apparent to Josie and Petros (keep hold of them, NBT…).
That’s not an issue, still money well spent with Bravand as we helped validate what they had already begun selling into the broader NBT team.
Plus, there were a few things that they hadn’t yet thought about. Yayy!
At this point, NBT was able to implement some of the recommendations we had made.
Access to Google Analytics and Hotjar granted, questions answered, discussions had, and Josie’s mock-ups of potential new designs for the Bookily page shared - on to our second and final pass.
We closed the project off with a meeting to share our final report and recommendations. And just in time for the NBT team to turn it around before code freeze starts. In fact, the NBT team has already implemented some of the recommendations from our final report.
"Sometimes significantly improving a website or service doesn't mean spending months on a project, absorbing a huge budget and involving a board of people. In many cases it is enough to demonstrate current issues & guide through the editing process of elements that are already on the site." Alexa Sielaff, Bravand
