Husqvarna – From Replace to Repair

Strategi

In a world where electronic waste is at an all-time high, it has never been more important to extend the life of products rather than replace them. The United States alone generates approximately 6.9 million tons of e-waste annually, with only 15% being properly recycled.

While some companies compromise product quality and resort to the business practice of replacing products rather than repairing them, Husqvarna does the opposite. They refuse to be a part of that broken system.

Sustainability is at the core of Husqvarna’s strategy. For more than 300 years Husqvarna have been making high-quality outdoor products that are built to last, and they represent a long Scandinavian tradition of user centered design.

But even the best products occasionally need to be serviced and one of the most effective ways of reducing e-waste is making it easy and accessible for users to repair their products.

So, we asked ourselves:

“What does it take to get more customers to care for, and repair their products to give them a longer life?”

We wanted to take Husqvarna’s legacy of simplicity and ease of use in their product design and extend it into the digital customer experience. So, we made qualitative and quantitative studies of more than 600 customers. In the studies we found that while many customers are indeed ready to repair rather than replace, the key obstacle for them was finding and locating the right part. Husqvarna has a vast catalog of spare parts, containing over 30,000 articles. Many users ended up waiting patiently on the phone for customer service or simply gave up in the search process.

Another factor was the big gap between business and private customers. Husqvarna's ecommerce channel is used by equal measures of professional foresters and residential amateur gardeners who had very different customer journeys and requirements to the buying experience.

For a professional forester, a broken product means loss of time and money so finding the right part fast is crucial. For a passionate amateur gardener, navigating a complex library of spare parts is daunting and often required too much in-depth technical expertise.

Løsning

Our ambition was to design an experience so swift and simple that it could be handled from the top of a tree or over a brief cup of coffee in the garden.

This called for a redesign of the entire experience. Designing an intuitive search experience across devices required us to have a uncompromising focus on simplicity. Navigation was only one part of the challenge. We needed to optimise the quality of entire product dataset, introducing product visualisations. We tailored faceted search to work with a wide set of user phrases and categories ultimately leading to a solution that delivers on the needs of the diverse user base – every time.

We went through several design iterations and user tests before we finally ended up with the perfect feature: a simple, versatile interactive spare part finder where users are offered a much more visual way of navigating through the huge library of products. This way, they can find what they need without knowing technical jargon or having technical expertise. They have immediate access to all relevant data and documents. They can add spare parts to basket directly from the feature with one single click without visiting PDPs or other intermediary steps.

The experience provides guidance every step of the way, and if users still have any questions, we made it easy for them to reach out to either Husqvarna or a local dealer online. This way, we can continue to listen to our users' needs in the future.