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.
UX | UI redesigns
Front-end page building (Elementor)
Van Der Blij had all of their product information very neatly published in print catalogues. The website however failed to match the sophisticated look and feel, as well as essentially all of the very useful and highly detailed product specifications and information. Users were also confused that the site looked like an online store but didn’t actually function like one. Products were simply listed all together on messy category pages.
We decided to redesign and rebuild the frontend, starting at the product level and working backwards, since that was where pages were really falling apart on the frontend, and had large sets of missing product information. We would use Figma rapid prototyping and Wordpress’ builtin page builder, Elementor in order to refresh a large amount of pages quickly.
Product page and product information
Categorisation of product catalogue
Understanding and improving performance through improved user flows
Improve general brand look and feel
A large product inventory meant there was a lot of work to do on a product page level. Some of the product categories were also not structured well and category pages also needed quite a bit of work. This meant there was a lot of work to do on both and product and category level and this work needed to be executed simultaneously.
I had to build the product pages with a wordpress page builder called Elementor. This constrained what I was able to build, but also enabled me to understand the parameters of the frontend and design around that.
I started by mapping out the site’s products and determining which pages needed work to be done.
We decided to start at product level, rebuilding pages one by one.
Here I used Figma to design prototypes, then built those pages in Wordpress’ Elementor page builder myself.
Bounce rate reduced by 4.7%
Sessions of users who felt frustrated or confused and left the website, dropped from 12.2% to 8%
Monthly visits increased from an average of 590 to 871
