A Complete Redesign
Christy Sports was ready to take a closer look at their Patio Furniture site. Let's see what new goals and solutions were derived from this new challenge.
The Design Problem
Look and feel was do for an update to compete against rival furniture sites.
What is the site for:
Discovery, research and select, then connect
Future of patio furniture sales capability online. CS was unable to facilitate all of its patio retail services that it provides in store so an evaluation of CS patio retail capabilities online is needed as well as a way forward.
Surveys from CS customers indicated that they knew little of CS patio business online.those who were aware of the site, indicated that they used it to locate the closest location to them that sold patio. Those that had experience with ordering from the site were mostly accessories and small item customers. Patio furniture sold online consisted of less than 1% of all patio sales for the company.
My Roles in the Project
I was tasked with creating the new look and feel changes to the site.
I coordinated the changes to the site architecture to better address the UX issues that were discovered as well as the business goals of the patio department.
I developed the front end for all pages with static content that was not served up from a database. All pages that were outside of the catalog of products and retail conversion process.
Solution
The site was updated to match the format of the ski snowboard retail site The main navigation was updated to accommodate faster browsing to ready to ship items that could be purchased online with little to know service from CS patio experts.
Patio Furniture was limited to Collections that were featured in CS print. (These were carefully selected based on stock levels and ability to sell online)
Emphasis was placed on categories of items that ship immediately from online sales.
A new conversion path was put in place for customers to contact a local store to engage in consultation and expert sales service from store locations
How did the solution solve the problem (results)
Contact from site visits to store consultations increased.
The site maintained a small but steady flow of sales of quick ship merchandise
A new architecture for promoting patio furniture collections that were readily
Challenges
Convincing the uppers to limit the items shown online to just items that were in stock and ready to sell.
Major changes to site architecture which required new project proposal with the developer
Short Timeframe
Retrospective
The Look and feel was received well. And brought the site to be current with CS ski and snowboard
There was an increase in contacts from the site with local stores but conversion at stores remained elusive.