Northfinder Case Study • ui42.sk

Generali counts among well established and strong players in the Slovak market. It offers quality products ranging from life and vehicle insurance to property, accidental injury and travel insurance. Generali is proud of their pro-client attitude and individual tailor-made solutions. Their efforts have been appreciated and translated into many awards that Generali have been gaining annually at prestigious competitions organised by insurance and financial institutions.

The main requirement of the client was to increase the conversion ratio of orders. The task was to redesign the website, which would not only highlight the premium quality of Northfinder products but also create a clearer orientation for customers. This includes those who are not familiar with outdoor clothing, as well as those who buy fashion outdoor clothing for various activities. All of this with an emphasis on user experience – UX, thanks to which the website will be clear for visitors, intuitive to navigate, and without any obstacles during the shopping process.

Objectives of cooperation

Apart from essentials, we focused on queues, cache and also speed (using Google Analytics). As a result, we achieved - apart from other things - better alerting.

July 2020

A very important change at the beginning of summer was a shift from Memcache to Redis.

August 2020

Not letting ourselves get distracted by the sun shining on our keyboards, we furthered the development by adding a preview installation for every feature on Kubernetes platforme, thus accelerating the development and simplifying testing. We did also implement more Selenium tests, which were launched not only after every deploy, but also on a regular basis.

September 2020

Apart from upgrading hardware by using faster AMD EPYC servers, we also optimised the software. We reduced the amount of jobs in queues and in our effort to rewrite cache as opposed to deleting it, we wisely invalidated only certain websites parts (varnish cache). To suppress our database dependency, we decided to move data to a fast buffer.

October 2020

Autumn means speed tests! The first phase included a simple stress test for our varnish (tested with VSHosting). The second phase included tests using Apache jMeter. We completed multiple shopping scenarios at the same time to locate weaknesses in our infrastructure (bottlenecks) and find out how many orders in an hour we can successfully process.

November 2020

Live show - Black Friday in full swing meant careful monitoring before, during and after the shopping spree. Developers were available and ready to solve any problems that we might have run into. We also had extra pairs of eyes in alerts from Grafana (load, queues, etc), Selenium tests and we always kept an eye on the situation online with Nagios system.

Main services we provided to the client

Apart from essentials, we focused on queues, cache and also speed (using Google Analytics). As a result, we achieved - apart from other things - better alerting.

July 2020

A very important change at the beginning of summer was a shift from Memcache to Redis.

August 2020

Not letting ourselves get distracted by the sun shining on our keyboards, we furthered the development by adding a preview installation for every feature on Kubernetes platforme, thus accelerating the development and simplifying testing. We did also implement more Selenium tests, which were launched not only after every deploy, but also on a regular basis.

September 2020

Apart from upgrading hardware by using faster AMD EPYC servers, we also optimised the software. We reduced the amount of jobs in queues and in our effort to rewrite cache as opposed to deleting it, we wisely invalidated only certain websites parts (varnish cache). To suppress our database dependency, we decided to move data to a fast buffer.

October 2020

Autumn means speed tests! The first phase included a simple stress test for our varnish (tested with VSHosting). The second phase included tests using Apache jMeter. We completed multiple shopping scenarios at the same time to locate weaknesses in our infrastructure (bottlenecks) and find out how many orders in an hour we can successfully process.

November 2020

Live show - Black Friday in full swing meant careful monitoring before, during and after the shopping spree. Developers were available and ready to solve any problems that we might have run into. We also had extra pairs of eyes in alerts from Grafana (load, queues, etc), Selenium tests and we always kept an eye on the situation online with Nagios system.

Key Milestones of Cooperation

Unique e-commerce business plans ask for really matchless solutions.

We at ui42 are glad to be part of this successful Ahooy online shop story. The two gentlemen from Orava sometimes tend to be a little unorthodox in their methods (when they leap first and look around later) but that only makes this cooperation more challenging and closer to our hearts.

The results? Modern and fully functional online shop with unique design pieces, poised for expansion abroad.

Unique e-commerce business plans ask for really matchless solutions.

We at ui42 are glad to be part of this successful Ahooy online shop story. The two gentlemen from Orava sometimes tend to be a little unorthodox in their methods (when they leap first and look around later) but that only makes this cooperation more challenging and closer to our hearts.

The results? Modern and fully functional online shop with unique design pieces, poised for expansion abroad.

At ui42, we are convinced that the success of a product lies in understanding the needs and expectations of the end customer. That is why we initiated this project with customer research.

The main points of the qualitative user research were to define target groups, identify their needs and expectations (within focus groups), which they have in relation to purchasing outdoor clothing. The research also included identifying shortcomings and weaknesses within the current website, creating a detailed description of the customer "journey through the website", and exploring the expectations of the target group in terms of benefits and loyalty systems.