ING Good Finds

The biggest challenge was to go beyond the proven UX that users are familiar with to reduce the learning curve and for ease of use. We didn't want the e-commerce experience to be the same old, typical experience. After all, it's pushing for a "world first" slow commerce. We wanted the online experience to be as "tangible" as possible. For this project, we wanted to prove that a completely new experience can still work efficiently and have a positive user impression by providing thoughtful design and technology throughout the site.

We went with the option of literally creating a 3D online marketplace using three.js and WooCommerce with social enterprise stalls that changed every Saturday to make it feel like a real and tangible marketplace. Optimising 3D elements and integrating them with e-commerce was the most significant learning. We were initially worried that the users might find the website too gimmicky and result in a high bounce rate as the users are used to the stereotypical e-commerce platform experience. However, the analytics proved that good design + good performance + meaningful interactivity worked very well.

The main purpose of the project was to raise awareness and support small (but great) Australian social enterprises and encourage conscious shopping habits. For every Saturday for four weeks, we had 12 stalls open. And on average, 11.6 stalls were browsed by the users, with more than 50,000 users visiting the store each Saturday.

To make the online experience as tangible as possible, the 3D interactive market has real-time weather (cloudy, sunny, raining) and lighting (day, dawn, night) to reflect the actual weather and the time of the day.