Drive new sales by improving the customer experience, refreshing old content, and creating a user-centered information architecture and navigation structure.
Role: Information Architect, Content Strategist, Experience Strategist, Process Designer
The previous site architecture was largely order imposed from above, with products shoehorned into categories that didn’t quite fit them.
When developing the new information architecture, I started by auditing the overall product offer and recommended that some products be merged to make configuration as simple as possible.
Then, I began grouping products according to their type, like lounge chairs or coffee tables. Finally, I looked at the higher order groupings that made sense given the overall offer.
Once I arrived at a few proposals that made sense, I tested the existing state against the proposals using Optimal Workshop’s tree testing tool. After making some adjustments, I arrived at site navigation that performed significantly better than the current state did.
Since I knew that our users do read, and the users who read more are likely to be ones who will convert more, I made content as easy to scan and arresting as possible.
For people looking for dimensional content, it was easy to find and clear. For those who wanted to be inspired by marketing copy and get a reason they should buy, I leveraged bold typography our designers created to catch their eye and had our writers create pithy headlines to draw them in.
While it might have been ideal to have the writers working in the CMS, the volume of content that needed to be written and edited made it impossible.
Instead, I structured an Airtable base with fields that correspond to the copy fields in the CMS. I also included the internal IDs for every product, so that imports would be easy.
Writers worked in individualized Kanban boards of only the products assigned to them, and the editors did too. This kept everyone working on a manageable chunk of work and kept people from stepping on each others’ toes.
For things like the designer headshots and brief bios on product detail pages, I pulled content in from specific fields on the designer records themselves automatically. By leveraging the data relationships between brands, products, and designers, I reduced the amount of authoring time and effort, and made everything easier to maintain in the future.
I worked with our product designers to create a feature that made all environmental images shoppable. By tagging the image with the orderable product SKUs featured in that image, customers can easily find what they want, even if it’s a lamp in the background of a photo.
I went through the full offer with the top creatives at Design Within Reach and force ranked the products by sales volume, overall revenue, and brand value.
Based on those rankings, I broke them into tiered groups so our content creators could focus their work more effectively. Those groups began with Tier One, which would receive rich storytelling and imagery, down to Tier Four, which would just have the existing content ported over.
Customers were able to find the products they wanted, learn about them, and buy them easily.
This improved experience was due to the features I was responsible for like navigation and structured, scannable content, as well as a host of other features I influenced.
In the spring of 2021, the site was a Webby Honoree in the website categories of Best User Experience and Best Navigation/Structure, highlighting the excellent work all of us on the team did to create the best possible site.