Improving an appliance website experience for builders, architects, and designers.
By: Clara Shen
Tags: Ux Case Study, Web Design, UX Design, UX Research

Improving an appliance website experience for builders, architects, and designers.

We were tasked with improving the Blomberg website user experience to cater to a more specific audience looking for high-quality home appliances.

Blomberg produces home appliances for consumers and distributors in the US market that serve high-quality European designs at competitive prices. They are experienced in European design trends, compact designs, and creating stylish urban appliances. We were approached with a UX Redesign brief that involved improving the website functionality and experience to support an increased focus towards catering to businesses directly (builders, architects, and designers). This included redesigning the information architecture, the features and functionalities matrix, and producing wireframes of our solutions for key pages.

The final goal of this project was to drive more traffic towards business-related pages and content, and increase contact form submission and therefore allow Blomberg to become a key appliance touchpoint for builders, architects, and designers.

Wireframe and high fidelity mockup of our design

Research

Reasons for Redesign

Build relationships with builder, designer, and architect community

Instill confidence and trust in business users as a quality brand

Improve usability so users more easily find relevant content, products, and information

The existing website is quite simple and minimal. Although it contains a lot of documentation and data about Blomberg products, the design and functionality of the site doesn’t really fit this purpose. As a result, users cannot find what they need, ultimately weakening the business strategy.

Research methods

We used HotJar, Google Analytics, and UserTesting.com to observe how users navigate and use the Blomberg website.

Example screen for a usertesting.com session

HotJar was installed on the existing website, which provided us with heatmaps and session recordings so we could observe user behavior.

UserTesting.com was used to observe 5 people from the target group (architect, interior designers, and builders) aged 46–58, from the USA and Canada. We prepared a series of tasks involving finding products, comparing them, finding key information, and downloading resources. The sessions were roughly 20–30 mins long.

Some of our findings from HotJar included:

Most users are ignoring key banner or header content, especially those in carousels

Users are likely to use filters

Copying the product item number is a frequently performed action

Users spend most time on product detail pages searching for a specific parameter or detail

Example of Hotjar heatmap

Overall, most of our findings from HotJar pointed to the fact that although the website is designed aesthetically well and cleanly, users are having difficulty finding relevancy and finding information they need. This was further supported by user sessions recorded on UserTesting.com, where we provided a few scenarios and tasks for architects, designers and builders to perform on the Blomberg website. We also discovered the following issues:

Generic images make it difficult for users to assess the purpose of the website

A lack of useful filters

The compare table was poorly implemented

Navigation headings were ambiguous

Important information is missing from the specifications table

The brochure maker is a very useful feature, but not where users expect it to be

Quotes from UserTesting.com

“The website is well done, clean/modern, and as an architect and designer it appeals to me” “… but once i started searching for appliances, it became a difficult, frustrating, stressful task — and it shouldn’t be — appliances come in standard sizes, features, etc.” “The aesthetics are great, but more attention to functionality is needed”

Designing the solution

Information architecture

The existing navigation structure was a little neglected. There were some redundancies present and some bloated areas of navigation which were diluting the categories and sometimes misleading customers. We wanted to tighten the information architecture so customers are clearly guided to useful tools and of course, products.

Some of the key improvements we made where:

Make top navigation elements unambiguous and clear

Remove “Products” heading — a redundant navigation title

Make it clearer and easier for the target audience to find tools such as “brochure maker”

Remove ambiguous titles regarding marketing content that may be misinterpreted or mistaken for something else

After comparing the IA with some other well-known appliance brands, we decided to create the following solution. We believe it balances well the need to promote and show products, as well as direct users to useful tools for our niche.