How can we lead people to focus more on artisans behind these beautiful products?
Introduction
Azizi Life is a non-profit organisation based in Muhanga, Rwanda, that supports local communities by providing various opportunities. They began with a business development programme in which they provided artisan cooperatives a channel to connect with international customers. Today, they are enlightening broader communities with more activities, ranging from adult literacy programme to providing professional trainings.
I engaged with Azizi Life while I was serving for my military in Muhanga. We casually met and shared our activities in Rwanda and new opportunities we were trying to bring to the local community. Our sharing brought an idea of transforming their existing website into a proper e-commerce to target wider audience in the globe, and I happily volunteered to help them with it.
Challenges
Azizi Life was mainly targeting U.S. customers through existing channels including their old website. Our main challenge was to identify what is possible through the new e-commerce and define our directions. Also, we needed to find a way to collaborate efficiently as the members were working from all over the world.
Objectives
Planning an e-commerce is far more complex than planning a website. Especially for Azizi Life, launching an e-commerce also meant bringing new activities and programmes. We needed to align website features with their upcoming plans as well as allow them to add new offers later by themselves.
Amount of content
Azizi Life not only had a vast number of products from their main business, but also tons of stories to share from their communities. Most of the articles needed to be republished as we were introducing a fresh concept. The local team was already gathering stories and preparing new photographs, but they needed longer time to polish them.
Working from everywhere
When the project begun, my service in Rwanda has already ended, and I was back in South Korea. Also, the visual designer was located in U.S., so we all had to work from different continent. Every role in other parts of the world was surely a big challenge – we could barely find a meeting time when we were all awake!
By the time we were discussing about this project for the first time in 2013, the practice of running an e-commerce was not as clear to everyone as today. Me and a business designer who was also supporting earlier phase of the planning thought Azizi Life might not be fully aware of the amount of effort they needed to put on running the platform, not only on making it. Thus, assuring their understanding was one of our core challenges.
Another major challenge was to find a way to setup our project so that all roles – visual design, web development and content design – could progress in parallel, without having to wait for others working in different time zones.
Approach
Before we could kickstart our project, we needed to be clear in what Azizi Life wanted to achieve through the new platform. For this, me and the business designer suggested to go through several consulting sessions to help them understand what they were about to do.
Understanding e-commerce
As mentioned above, running an e-commerce is far more complex than having a website. The business operations have to be re-aligned with the platform in mind, and Azizi Life would need to invest much more time and effort to keep the content up-to-date. The business designer advised them from marketing point of view, emphasising the importance of growing demand for new contents in social network driven world.
I expressed similar opinion from technical point of view and explained how search engines prioritise newly updated contents in search result. More importantly, I ensured them the necessity of technical training for updating contents, not only for saving their time but also for maintaining the quality of contents in terms of web user experience.
I also guided them through what features are available through e-commerce platforms, so they could plan their programmes accordingly. For example, they wanted to launch a new experience programme which would require a booking functionality, so I advised them to create a list of needed features for easier communication.
After going through several sessions, Azizi Life spent long months to plan their new activities and prepare contents for the new e-commerce website, hence a full pause of the project until 2015.
Technical setup
I had to find a technical solution that is highly customisable as well as easy enough so everyone could collaborate simultaneously. After discussing with the visual designer, I decided to use a paid WordPress theme that had visual block editing feature and WooCommerce integration. The fact that he already had experiences with this theme was also a great advantage.
Rather than changing things by directly editing theme's PHP files, I used theme's customisation feature as much as possible so the visual designer could also tweak CSS directly by himself. This would reduce my development speed as I had to edit everything on web editor, but obviously the benefit of collaboration was superior. Thus, only necessary technical features were implemented via WordPress's child theme functionality.
Collaboration process
To onboard the content team, me and the visual designer made several scaffolding pages with theme's editor so they could duplicate them and input only the texts.
This way, they could add their contents while we were working on design and technical features.
Several sessions were also organised to go through WooCommerce features. During the sessions, I provided basic training on adding products as well as aligned with the team for necessary features such as booking calendar for field activities.
Outcome
After almost two years of design and development, the new e-commerce website was finally launched. Due to the geographical constraints and vast amount of content, post development process took longer time, but as the result, Azizi Life successfully integrated the web platform into their business.
Storytelling
Besides all the e-commerce features, our primary focus was on storytelling. Every single product and activity offered by Azizi Life are directly associated to local artisans and cooperatives, and we wanted to find an effective way to introduce them and their backgrounds to the customers.
As shown above, we came up with an idea to pin artisans to each product to give visual attention. By clicking on the element, visitors can quickly view summary and quotes from artisans without having to leave the page.
Also, all the products are published with rich number of photos to give more visual context. Rather than showing only the products, many of them include photos of artisans or surroundings, so customers can naturally engage with the stories behind the craft and imagine lifestyles around them.
Growth beyond e-commerce
The launch of the new website enabled Azizi Life to be more active in introducing new programmes. The collaboration setup during the development involved thorough training on WordPress and WooCommerce, and this also became part of maintenance hand over. All needed features such as time booking were pre-implemented so Azizi Life could update new activities or products by themselves in future.
For example, they earlier offered only one Experience Day programme along with their products, which was meant for tourists visiting Rwanda. Now, such on-field activities have grown into a major business, and currently, they offer more than ten programmes through the website. In addition, they have launched a dedicated studio for workshops, which is also introduced and booked through the platform.
Learnings
I am proud to have done this pro bono project with such a big scale with multiple stakeholders involved. It was by far my biggest web-related project, as it extended beyond the online platform and transformed an entire business. I was lucky to have Azizi Life as my client, who was ready for the challenge and passionate to push themselves further through the investment – which is quite unusual for many NGOs.
An unusually long project
Azizi Life was very serious about transforming their business into a modern one, and they were putting lots of effort in polishing their content. Given large number of local partners, they had to take about a year to sort out future business directions as well as gather stories and footages for the new website.
Things have changed a lot. Forget OpenCart, let's use WooCommerce!
This period brought a major change in technical setup. During the initial planning phase in 2013, I was opting for OpenCart as our back-end engine, as I had experiences with it and other MVC frameworks. However, as I was drafting the first version of the new Azizi Life website, I quickly learnt its limits:
1. Difficult maintenance. This is actually not true today, but earlier version of OpenCart did not have auto-update functionality, meaning that Azizi Life will have to hire a developer to keep the engine up-to-date.
2. High learning curve. Also related to the above, both development and using OpenCart itself required a good understanding of the framework. This directly affect maintenance as well, as it would be difficult for Azizi Life to find someone with the knowledge.
Luckily, WooCommerce has grown rapidly during the pause period, and I could safely recommend the switch to WordPress + WooCommerce. To be fair, this combination also has high learning curve, but obviously it has incomparably larger community to support.
This process gave me clearer idea on what factors I need to consider in choosing the right technology and importance of monitoring the trend. I applied these learnings in my other consulting works to help clients in choosing solutions.
Supports beyond the web
As me and Azizi Life shared our time together in Muhanga for over two years, we often shared our thoughts and experiences from our activities. During the project, I also had several opportunities to support them in other areas than the web.
For example, I had a chance to be involved in one of their pilot activities. I once mentioned them that I wanted to learn to weave a basket, and they introduced me to an artisan to give me a workshop. This later became a regular activity introduced in their Experience Days programme.
This gave me much clearer idea on what Azizi Life was trying to achieve through their new e-commerce platform and what related features are needed. I learnt that just like a service design project, such activities or workshops could be organised in research phase for an e-commerce project.