Loresan Planners: July 2026

Goal : Enable more Teacher Planner customers to order independently online

Result : 12% → 85%+ ordering and paying independently online

The challenge:

Loresan Planners creates an extensive range of thoughtfully designed products - from wedding and personal planners to fitness trackers, work diaries and much more.

Teacher Planners are just one part of the business, but during the busy back-to-school period they become an important and highly seasonal part of the offering.

Gillian, the Founder, is also a secondary school teacher. She understands exactly what teachers need from their planners - and the demand for the product was already there.

The challenge wasn't the Teacher Planner itself. It was how customers were ordering it.

Only 12% of Teacher Planner customers were completing the full ordering and payment process independently online. Most needed Gillian's help to understand their options, make their choices and complete their order.

Orders were coming through phone calls, WhatsApp messages, social media DMs and conversations in person. That meant Gillian was not only providing one-to-one guidance, but also managing and keeping track of orders across multiple channels during one of the busiest periods for Teacher Planners.

Moving customers to a clear online journey had the potential to change much more than how an order was placed.

One consistent online process could:

reduce the amount of individual support each order required;
make orders easier to manage and track;
reduce the risk of details being missed or incorrectly transferred between channels;
create a clear record of each customer's order and choices;
make future interactions with returning customers easier;
provide better insight into the formats, layouts and additional pages teachers were actually choosing;
inform future improvements and additions to the Teacher Planner range; and
allow the business to handle more Teacher Planner orders without requiring the same increase in Gillian's time.

The opportunity was clear: create an online journey that gave customers enough clarity and confidence to complete the entire process themselves - while creating a simpler, more consistent and more useful process for the business too.

The behaviour we wanted to change

The objective was clear.

We wanted customers to move from needing Gillian's help to choose and order to understanding their options, making their own decisions, ordering and paying independently online.

This wasn't about removing Gillian from the customer experience. It was about taking the knowledge she repeatedly shared with customers one-to-one and building it into the online journey.

What we did:

1. Started with the behaviour

Rather than beginning with the website design, I started with a more important question:

Why weren't customers completing the journey themselves?

We looked at what customers were doing, where they needed Gillian's help and the questions that repeatedly came up during the ordering process.

That helped identify where the existing journey wasn't giving customers enough clarity or confidence to continue independently.

2. Looked at the journey from the customer's perspective

We broke the Teacher Planner ordering process down step by step.

What does a teacher need to decide first?

What information do they need before making that decision?

Which choices genuinely matter?

Where could uncertainty creep in?

And where was the customer being expected to know something that Gillian understood instinctively after years of teaching and working with other teachers?

This shifted the focus from what the business needed to ask to what the customer needed in order to decide.

3. Used Gillian's knowledge

One of the most valuable resources was already inside the business.

Gillian knew how to guide her customers.

Through her conversations with teachers, she knew the questions they asked, the options that needed explanation and the areas where they tended to need reassurance.

We used that knowledge to help shape the online experience.

Instead of requiring Gillian to provide the same guidance repeatedly, the journey itself could begin providing it.

4. Simplified the decisions

Teacher Planners offer genuine choice - but choice can also increase the mental effort required to make a decision.

We looked at how those choices were presented and simplified the decision-making process without taking useful choice away.

Options were organised more logically, unnecessary complexity was reduced and decisions were presented in an order that made sense to the customer.

5. Changed the language

We reviewed the language throughout the journey.

The aim wasn't simply to make the copy shorter. It was to make sure customers could immediately understand what each option meant and why they might choose it.

We moved towards clearer, more customer-focused language based on the way teachers themselves talked about what they needed.

6. Created a guided Build Your Own journey

All of that thinking came together in a clearer Build Your Own Teacher Planner experience.

Rather than being presented with a product and then needing Gillian to explain how to configure it, customers could work through the decisions themselves in a logical sequence.

The website became more than somewhere to place an order.

It became part of the decision-making process.

7. Made sure it worked for the business too

There was another important consideration.

A customer experience improvement isn't particularly useful if it creates more work behind the scenes.

So the new process also needed to make sense operationally for Gillian.

The same structured journey could be used when Gillian did work directly with a customer in a consultation, making it easier for her to place the resulting order too.

The solution needed to work for the customer and for the person delivering it.

The result

12% → 85%+

Before the changes, only 12% of Teacher Planner customers were ordering independently through the website.

Following the changes, more than 85% were completely self-sufficient - choosing their Teacher Planner, completing their order and paying through loresanplanners.ie without needing Gillian's assistance.

That's a shift of more than 73 percentage points in independent online ordering.

But the result isn't only the number.

Customers now have a clearer route to something they already wanted to buy.

Gillian has significantly fewer customers relying on her individual guidance to complete the same process.

The business can now handle more Teacher Planner orders without each new customer requiring Gillian's individual support.

The psychology behind the journey:
The changes weren't based on intuition or simply making the website look different. They were informed by established research into how people process information, evaluate choices and make decisions.

Reducing cognitive effort

Every additional piece of information a customer has to interpret places another demand on their attention and thinking. Research on processing fluency shows that the ease or difficulty with which information is processed can influence people's judgements and decisions.

For the Teacher Planner journey, this meant making information easier to understand, removing unnecessary complexity and presenting customers with what they needed at the point they needed it.

Structuring choice

More choice isn't automatically better. Research by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper famously demonstrated that extensive choice can sometimes reduce motivation to act compared with a more manageable choice set.

The aim with Loresan wasn't to take valuable choice away. It was to structure those choices more effectively - helping teachers understand what they needed to decide, and in what order.

Designing the decision environment

Research into choice architecture shows that the way information, choices and decision support are organised can influence how people navigate a decision. A major review of the field groups choice-architecture techniques around decision information, decision structure and decision assistance.

We applied that thinking to the ordering journey: considering not only what information customers received, but when they received it, how their options were presented and what support they needed to progress independently.

Using language customers can process easily

Clear language isn't simply a copywriting preference. Processing fluency research demonstrates that the ease with which information is processed can influence judgement; studies have found effects across familiarity, confidence, perceived truth and other evaluations.

So the language throughout the journey was reviewed from the customer's perspective, using familiar terminology and making each choice easier to understand.

From intention to action

This is the part I would bring everything back to.

The customers already wanted the product.

The behavioural objective wasn't to persuade teachers to buy something they didn't want. It was to understand what was preventing more of them from completing an intended behaviour independently - and redesign the journey around those barriers.

The result: independent online ordering increased from 12% to 85%+

The demand for Teacher Planners was already there. The challenge was making the online journey clear and intuitive enough for customers to complete it independently.

By understanding where customers needed help - and why - we could redesign those moments to better support decision-making and make it easier to move from choosing to ordering and paying online.