Maisonette

Maisonette is an expertly curated marketplace of products for babies and kids — with trusted guidance and inspiration. After noticing that a significant portion of traffic to its ecommerce site was from mobile devices, Maisonette decided to partner with Reaktor to develop a native app. This app would be more optimized, personalized, and customer-friendly – encouraging repeat purchases from customers.

Maisonette partnered with Reaktor in 2021 with the mission to create an inspirational, personalized, and integrated mobile experience. The app’s main focus was to execute its core features exceptionally well. The idea was to leverage mobile-specific features such as push notifications and personalization to provide a faster, more responsive, and convenient shopping experience – particularly for repeat customers. The app would integrate with other platforms to make it easier for customers to discover new products, and to encourage them to complete their purchases even after leaving the app.

The key design challenge was to create a layout structure optimized for mobile that supports multiple ways of navigating the wide, multi-brand assortment while narrowing down on products that suit the customer’s needs. The home feed is designed for discoverability and to support impulse buying. It provides a personal and inspirational way for shoppers who are leisurely browsing for inspiration, or just killing time. 

The category navigation, search, and filtering features support more goal-oriented and rational buying, and provide a fast and frictionless design for findability. The goal here was to optimize for speed: getting shoppers to the right products with ease and as little friction as possible.

To build a consistent experience that combines multiple brands and establishes Maisonette as a premium destination, it was important to build the Maisonette brand into each touchpoint. We wanted to make every encounter feel vibrant, playful, fun, a little different, balanced, soft, minimal, and fast.

We streamlined the details of key views to focus on the information that is most essential, and created an intuitive cart experience with streamlined checkout. By hiding the complexity that comes from multi-brand fulfillment and having too much data on view, we make repeat purchases as easy as possible.

To increase a customer’s confidence in their purchase decision, we focused on the UI interaction elements that customers interact with most. In the product detail page, we highlight images, use a tray element to collect product information, and have product details easily scannable, but collapsed by default.

On top of that, we designed new UI interactions to support typical shopping behavior while being fast and responsive. For example, we optimized for “pogo-sticking”, navigating back and forth between the product listing page (PLP) and product detail page (PDP), based on the insight that 60% of customers navigate back to the product listing page from the product page.

The Maisonette mobile app was created by a small, globally distributed team of experienced Reaktor designers and developers working in close cooperation with Maisonette. By reusing backend services created for the website and building the app using the latest technologies, the team was able to bring the app from concept to working product in just six months. Since launch, the team has created frequent releases of the app for quick feedback. Understanding how customers interact with the app has helped identify opportunities for further development.

• Software architecture and design
• UI design
• Native apps for iOS and Android
• Updated design guidelines consistent with brand
• Localized content in multiple languages
• Training and development