INTRODUCTION
Krost Business Furniture is a leading Australian owned commercial furniture manufacturer and supplier. Krost provides tailored office solutions, directly to businesses and government organisations, and via interior designers, architects and builders. Krost primarily services the Sydney region, while its sister company, Klein Business Furniture, services the Melbourne region.
By and large, for a website CMS and company that can help us – Elcom has been a very good fit for us and we’ve grown with Elcom too. They have the ability to customise our website and make it look exactly the way we want, with a team of experts to support you during and beyond the project.
MY ROLE
UX/UI Designer— discovery, user research, design, testing
TEAM
Bryan Poggo, Manager
Maria Cheringnets, Project Manager
Senthil Kumar, Front-end Developer
Visit Site
THE CHALLENGE
The website is the central to Krost business success. It’s often the first place new and existing customers look for furniture when they’re in the purchasing cycle.
Visually the website sells the product and provides the necessary information for potential buyers. They’ve been using our Elcom CMS to run their website since 2002. Every 4 or 5 years they go through a major redesign to keep on top of design trends and technology changes.
For their latest redesign, they wanted everything in a much more responsive design to optimise mobile and tablet viewing. They also wanted to showcase their products through large visually appealing images, improve search and maintain fast site loading.
GOALS
Our high level goals were:
- Providing new look and feel
- Increase the user retention
- Creating an engaging platform
- Responsive layout
THE PROCESS
My first step was to identify the business goal, exisiting tickets(from the Helpdesk Support team) and possible problems with the stakeholders. Then, I did a research on the website and users to gain more insights. After having the needed information, I iterated on 3 rounds of design and finally delivered the project.
USER RESEARCH
Usability test on current design
To find major issues of the current design, I ran an unmoderated usability test with 6 participants using Marvel app. I chose this method since the participants lived in australia and they were business professionals.
PERSONA
By gathering data and conducting interviews with users and stakeholders, we were able to figure out the target users who have interests in improving their workspace and office interiors. These are the highlights for each persona:
RESEARCH INSIGHT
User-centered design canvas
1. BUSINESS
A company providing business furniture to corporate entities, Government offices, and Business Organisations.
2. USERS
- New or large Business companies who want to improve their workspace
- Government - need of infrastructure improvements
- Creative organisations looking for custom model furnitures
- Individual self employed workers - to set up home workspace
3. USER'S PAIN POINTS
These are the findings from a series of 6 tasks I created:
- Cannot navigate the website to find the needed information
- Finding difficult to access product categories
- Once Product addded to cart, not able to remove it
- Not device friendly
- Unorganised product detail page
- Taking more loading time
4. MOTIVES
- Find information about the company's products and services
- Search Furniture and other products
- Find the workstation catlogs
- Enquire about the projects and products offered
- Buy furnitures online
- Rent furnitures
5. SOLUTIONS
- Show most important information first based on user research
- Improve visual design to catch the users attention
- Organising contents in detail page
- Responsive layout
- Options to remove products from cart
- Optimize the images/scripts to reduce the loading time
USER FLOWS
SITEMAP
WIREFRAMES
Next step was to create low-fidelity wireframes. I made only few key wireframes and for remaining sub-screens we directly started with the design with a base idea from the existing wireframes.
- Presented to the developers to show them the layout and user flow.
- To put in front of stakeholders to test and give us feedback.
I met with the developers to show and discuss the wireframes. They felt the features of the site all seemed possible to do within our time frame and CMS product.
HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
THE OUTPUT
Here are the few major areas that we have improved for the Krost Business Furniture,
- Overall, improved the website look and feel.
- New design implmentation for responsive devices.
- Improved featured product section which links directly to the product page.
- The Project gallery page has been tailored to highlight better for the customers.
- The Product navigation menu displays a drop-down featuring the front page of the latest catalogue, with a strong call to action to order the catalogue. This links through to the ‘Get a Catalogue’ page with a form to capture new leads.
- We have implemented the blog posts as a dynamic widget, which allows the client to easily manage the blog contents by pulling the post title, image and taxonomy of the latest blog posts and displaying it on the homepage.
- Improved version of "Add to cart" page, helping the user to add more quantity and remove the item from the cart.
- Organised "Product detail" page well to provide the users with the detailed description and features about that furniture.
THE IMPACT
OVERALL WEBSITE VISITS INCREASED BY
25%
INCREASED IN USERS BY
21%
INCREASED IN MOBILE USERS BY
73%
- When the website redesign went live, we saw an immediate increase in visits and users. In the 12-month period since launching, overall website visits increased by 25% and the number of users increased by 21%. The number of mobile users increased significantly, up 73% as a result of new optimised mobile experience.
- Across the business, krost business furniture had a good year in terms of sales and the website certainly contributed to this.
- They’ve seen an increase in online form requests to contact sales and receive a catalogue since the redesign.
- Using the multi-site function to deploy both the Krost and Klein websites on one Elcom CMS instance provides the client with many benefits. They were able to apply the redesign to both websites simultaneously, reducing the overall redesign cost.
It's impressive how well the website highlights our products, creates a good impression of the brand and helps convert potential buyers into customers.