Irrigation Product | Exploratory for Website Refresh and Rebrand
Discovery Research — Design Research
5 weeks || Stakeholder & User Interviews, Competitive Analyses, Jobs to be done || Lead UX Researcher
Process
Background
Our client is a large irrigation product manufacturer, whose site needed a refresh so they initially approached us requesting a responsive mobile-friendly site yet as we dug deeper we found both the company and the industry to be a lot more nuanced than imagined. When we were tasked to redesign our client’s website, not only did think through how this was an industry unfamiliar to us, we realized this was a site whose design hadn’t been updated in nearly 2 decades. This allowed us to push for a sincere discovery phase to learn about our client’s business, their brand, and their industry from an outsider perspective, to build the foundation of a new digital experience that will also stand the test of time.
Objective
Our challenge was to balance a user centered approach alongside creating a site that could be a significant intervention for prospective customers given the atypical sales model and the client being a manufacturer rather than a dealer. To do this, beyond just making the site responsive (it wasn’t) we wanted to understand the brand to meet the standard for experiences our client was known for and get into the technical details of understanding the industry, preserve relevant content, and prioritize data and content already available.
Methods
Our team (Myself, a UX designer, and a UI designer) decided to take an inventory of the site’s pages and their product content, undertaking a brief UX audit of the site.
We also undertook a competitive analysis to understand other companies in the landscape, and our designer did an additional competitor design audit.
I undertook 12 Stakeholder (and user) Interviews targeted at company executives, farmers/growers, and dealers.
We synthesized those findings into “Jobs to be done”, an alternative to personas based on which we can build a comprehensive set of user needs. You can read a bit more about the methodology vis a vis personas in an NN/g article here.
We also designed surveys to send out both within the company and directed to customers but these ultimately were dropped due to time constraints.
I followed that up with Web Analytics reviews once the design process had begun to get an insight into user behavior, popular pages, and queries etc.
Results
We learned a wealth of information about company, including:
The basics of how the industry worked,
The client’s brand value and company’s values,
What motivates growers and dealers to buy from the client,
Details about the product line, and
What issues users faced using the site (responsiveness, while important- was not high on the list)
Learnings
Competitor Design Audit
Thoughts from our audits were verified by the user interviews and two key areas were:
The navigation had to be decluttered both visually and from a content perspective. Hierarchies needed to be clear and we needed to avoid information overload.
Visually the brand needed to be uplifted. Good photography was a major part of all competitor sites and while our client had good product and environmental photographs, they weren’t blending into the page and adding to the overall impression.
User flow analytics
We knew it would be complicated to try and develop an understanding of our users through existing data given that we knew the site had several usability issues.
Still we got insight into which pages were most popular, where users were entering the site from which we could even occasionally infer which “personas” were following which functions. Nonetheless, we were also able to see abandonment on key interest pages, some misinterpretation around which pages might serve which purposes, and some other issues.
Our interviews confirmed even “power” users had a tough time finding content and relied heavily on the “site search” that they acknowledged had some issues as well.
Jobs to be done V1
As our understanding of the web flows changed and we took in the results of user interviews, we modified this and our V2 iteration included specifics on international customers, and we collapsed the learner and designer into a single category as information seekers.
We also had a challenge with some of this framework as one of our challenges was to reposition the brand to fit an important position:
“People think of us for high-quality products and high-quality people, but not necessarily as a thought leader”
We distilled our key usability recommendations to:
The site didn’t seamlessly support wayfinding for the users needs
“I have a specific problem I need to solve”:
Applications, Product differentiation, Find dealers“I need to find a certain piece of information”:
Product specifics, Troubleshooting resources
The content and information design of the site wasn’t doing the brand justice
The site wasn’t communicating the intimate nature of operations
“We cultivate a relationship with you”
The site didn’t tell the story of Why buy _____
There are long-term benefits of the whole product ecosystem
These would particularly impact the global customer base who may not be as connected by existing local channels
The current Contact Us process needs to be streamlined, yet made appealing to less tech-forward users
Outcomes & Impact
This process set us up for success by serving as the baseline during decision making processes during the site redesign.
In visual design, it helped the team take on a seamless brand refresh, and for the content strategy and wireframing stages it helped us build a user centric site that would speed up common workflows so primary/power users could quickly find information, while creating an approachable site appealing to prospects and bringing more users in to the ecosystem through thought leadership and answering “Why buy with us”.
Our review of analytics after the new site launch indicated we had solved for a variety of issues, significantly increasing direct search traffic, improving wayfinding and reducing key product page drop-offs.
Increased Organic search traffic by 87% and Monthly pageviews by 40% while decreasing Bounce Rates by 24%