Responses by Raffael Stüken, user experience and design/partner, Humans & Machines

Background: Goldkant Interior is a small but sweet interior design store in Cologne, Germany. With the relaunch of its website, the Goldkant team wanted to attract a bigger audience than the usual customers. The goal was to give a good impression of the stores’s portfolio, while also showcasing the warm and welcome atmosphere that the shop is already known for.

Highlights: The site’s design is very clean and minimal, but still comes with little twists and subtle details—like the Scandinavian-style furniture the store is offering. A greater challenge was on how to present the products listed on the site. We wanted to show a vast overview of Goldkant’s portfolio, but avoid a fragmented look. Therefore, the product overview pages offer a linear scroll with splitscreen section introductions. Product detail pages are opened inside slick modal windows to provide a continuous user flow.

Challenges: We at Humans & Machines create mostly custom ecommerce experiences for design driven companies. For a long time, however, we didn’t have a decent CMS solution for smaller clients and projects. We were still maintaining some TYPO3 or WordPress sites for legacy projects, but these tools seemed like dinosaurs and were not very pleasant to work with. But, with Craft CMS, we finally found a great tool to serve these purposes and Goldkant was the first site we built with it. Going for a new toolset always is a challenge and a risk as well, especially if you need to stick to a tight budget. However with Craft, we could not have been happier. It is “crafted” very well, feels slick and modern and lets us implement new functionalities in no time.

Technical features: On the frontend side, we had lots of fun with the now production ready CSS property position: sticky. Sticky elements before were always very hacky; they needed to be stuck via Javascript, which especially led to stuttering transitions on older devices. So with position: sticky, we now can create a playful but smooth experience to all devices. We also implemented some parallax slideshows that we really like.