Harmless Harvest

When the client contacted us, there were two Harmless Harvest websites — one on the WordPress platform and the other on Shopify. Their designs were similar, but the functions were different — the WordPress website served just to display the products, and after the customer pressed the Buy button, they were redirected to the Shopify store to make the purchase. So, our main goal was to create a single, fully-functional Harmless Harvest online store instead of the existing two.

The design of the WordPress website was very outdated, alongside with its UX; and on the Shopify store, only one product out of many was displayed.

We needed to completely rethink the UX and UI of the new website, making the customer journey easy and intuitive, and highlight the variety of the products. While creating a new design, we also had to follow the strict Harmless Harvest style guidelines and web accessibility principles.

After researching further, we found out that all functionality that was distributed between two different platforms could be implemented solely within Shopify. Given the specifics of the project, there was also no need to build a custom theme from scratch, as the required functionality could be implemented with some customizations within a theme from the Shopify Theme Store.

In the end, we recommended Harmless Harvest to move to Shopify and customize a ready-made theme — this would lower future maintenance costs and reduce the budget for the project.

Before the start of the work, we needed to estimate the exact time required for the project delivery. Usually, to do this correctly, you need to have both the layouts and the store theme, and in our case there were also web accessibility services to consider. But at the time of the estimation we didn’t have any of this, because the work on the project hadn’t begun yet; we relied only on the skills of our development team without any specific data available.

In the end, our initial estimate proved to be correct, both when we re-estimated the project when the layouts were ready, and at the end of the work — this is truly impressive!

After the client chose the theme for the new store (we selected a few themes based on their built-in functionality, code quality and design), our UX/UI team conducted extensive research, redesigned the customer journey and created layouts for the whole store based on that chosen theme.

After the redesign, Harmless Harvest got an intuitive website that is very easy to use for any customer, regardless of age or ability. The store also has a sleek design, created with the web accessibility requirements in mind. Moreover, the website is also future-proof — the store’s design can evolve with the business without any additional cost (for example, if the number of Harmless Harvest products increases, we already made allowance for that).

After the layouts were approved by the client, development began. At the same time, we started building a custom app for integration with Zendesk.

After development was completed, our QA department checked the website for bugs, and the development team prioritized the issues found and fixed them. As a result, the website works perfectly on any browser or device.