As the main aim of the sites’ transfers was to improve their UX, a full UX review was undertaken of both sites in order to highlight areas that require improvement. The first step in achieving this was to have our specialist UX designer look over them and recommend ways in which the fundamental layout and appearance of the sites could be updated to improve the user journey.
We then gained access to and analysed data from Google Analytics and Hotjar. This helped us see how users have been interacting with the sites previously. These tools provided the means to analyse metrics such as page views, bounce rates, button clicks, and conversion rates. Understanding how users spend most of their time on the site, how they are navigating around it, whether they are adding items to the basket, and so on is very important.
One of the main aspects to come out of the UX review’s findings was the main navigation. Due to the mass amount of stock that both websites hold, the menu on the previous sites appeared cluttered, limiting its use in allowing users to navigate around the site. Two major steps were undertaken to tackle this issue:
- A mega menu was introduced to clearly display the top-level categories in the main navigation and provide users a clear journey to the sub-category they were looking for. The mega menu now includes singular dropdowns that provide options to instantly shop by areas such as department, product type, and brand
- We moved the search bar into the middle of the page to allow users to more easily find it, as the findings from Hot Jar identified that users were more likely to search for a product than look through all the listed products
In order to accommodate for some of the other key specifications, we incorporated pinned filters on category pages so users can continuously filter their search as they browse through products, installed a third party extension to allow account holders to continue acquiring points upon purchase, and set-up the functionality within Magento to allow specific categories and products to have specific size guides allocated to them.
Overall, we delivered two great looking sites, on the same Magento 2 platform, that enabled users to navigate and shop more easily, while incorporating the required features and functionality.