New Balance

From June 2021 to March 2023 I was employed at Van Der Blij (Netherlands) to improve the overall user experience, look and feel, and functionality of the website.

Van Der Blij sells construction and lifting equipment in the Netherlands. Their website serves as a catalogue of their product line however, where a product specialist assist you in the purchasing process directly, rather than through an online shop.

Deliverables

UX | UI redesigns
Front-end page building (Elementor)

Team
1 Senior UX/UI Designer
1 UX Designer
Project Manager
Senior Development Manager
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My Role
Senior UX/UI Designer

Scope
Home page redesign (desktop & mobile)
Dashboard (desktop & mobile)
App Redesign

Problem

The initial scope of work and feature stack was larger than anything we had handled before, and contained a host of new plugins that the team hadn’t worked with either. The sitemap also included new categorisation that would allow for better navigation on their product ranges. Taking into consideration the larger project scope along with a fast-tracked timeline the main challenge became apparent early on. We had to incorporate a large amount of new features in a short amount of time, without the user experience deteriorating. Up until that point, the mobile experience was largely neglected, but around 60% of users were using the sit through mobile. The time had come for a complete UX rethink.

Solution

Mobile first
Optimising for search
Optimise navigation and filtering
Stronger experience pages for tailored marketing campaigns
Retain global brand standards, but optimising for a local audience

Users & Audience

One of the most useful sets of data was from Black Friday 2019, with larger traffic and data sets. The main challenge here was to find valuable insights that could assist us in deciding where to focus our efforts, at which periods in the project lifecycle.
We focussed on retaining the aspect of the site that worked well, and identified elements that needed work.

Scope & Constraints

My response to protecting the experience, as well as my own capacity, had to become saying no to certain features, and knowing when to prioritize one idea over another. As a UX team-of-one, I had many other large brands to work with at the same time, and the simple but effective UX processes helped us to manage the scope of the project well.

We build the site using external developers, since they were more time efficient and experienced. This meant that the high-fidelity prototypes would set the scope for what they would build for us, and really helped in us negotiating between client and the development team.

My Process

Discovering the brand’s global footprint by doing research into other countries' online stores helped us to understand the design trends we could use to improve design. Covid had also hit and we had to keep working together effectively. This enabled me to introduce a white-boarding tool to help us plan and sketch out quick wireframes over zoom calls.
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Defining the feature sets for the Minimal Viable Product was mostly done through freehand wireframes and this helped to retain collaborative workflows within the team,. Simple wireframing sessions turned into a way to keep information organised, keep stakeholders aligned, and ensured that we address any issues early on. The team was also able to faster map out site structures and how to approach custom landing pages for marketing new product ranges.

Developing
a new design system, rather than just a prototype, helped to create an more holistic view of the outcome.
I started designing mobile first, as over 60% of all sit-traffic went through mobile. With these concepts in hand, we ran quick internal scrums to determine which would be feasible, sorting functionality based on importance.

I then
Delivered a strategy to align the systematic integration of features post-launch, which the marketing and content team could use to identify features that could be useful and would suit their upcoming campaigns.
One way in which we enabled faster workflows and handovers to developement, was to use one set of imagery for each collection pag instead of multiple banners for each device. These banners were set to slide responsively, which enable us to repeat this format across collections without becoming repetitive and achieving the final goal: cutting out the clutter and letting the product itself do the talking.

Outcomes & Lessons

⬀5,2%

Mobile search usage increased
*the metric we had set to measure search usage click rates based on multiple heat-maps across landing and category pages increased by around 5,2% . Along with the launch of several high opportunity collections, we established that users were searching more often and for specific ranges which enabled us to capitalise on those opportunities.

⬀13%

Black Friday went smoothly
The following Black Friday, the site handled over double the amount of traffic and a staggering 13% increase in conversion rate.The team also reported feeling better prepared and organised this time around, due to better workflows.

⬂ 3,7%

Drop-off rates decreased
A month after launch we started seeing the drop-off rates(the rate at which a user leaves without interacting) decreasing.

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