Create a low-effort, high-impact solution to optimize the Suits & Sandals website and increase conversion rates.
Suits & Sandals - Web Design and Branding Agency.
Entire product design from research to conception, visualization and client presentation.
Suits & Sandals (S&S)’ monthly website visits are lower than ideal and correspondingly, conversion rates are low as well. Furthermore, website user sessions are shorter than desired which is detrimental to SEO and means visitors don’t have time to pipeline to contact.
This means a lot of the burden for engaging new business falls on time-consuming proposals etc, rather than being organically sourced from website visitors.
S&S is a busy agency so we need low-effort, high-impact improvements to help increase organic conversions.
Stakeholder M. is the company’s Art Director, and his priorities are accordingly more focused on the look and feel of the website, as well as restructuring the UI to reflect the company’s branding.
Stakeholder N. is the SEO expert and product manager. Accordingly, his concerns and priorities revolve around SEO and funneling.
N. posits that a large section of visitors reach the website through marketing pages such as blog posts. He is concerned with ensuring that each port of entry provides sufficient incentive and clarity to guide users to further explore the website.
The nature of this project meant optimization suggestions couldn’t be collected from users (past and present clients) but would have to be inferred from secondary and competitor research instead.
Analysis: successful hero sections include a short description of what the company does and a CTA prompting users to either get in contact, or learn more.
Analysis: successful portfolios engage by using storytelling, figures, before and afters, and creative UI to present their success cases.
Each Service/Capability descriptor connects to a specialized Services page with further detail. UI is varied.
On a first look, a few items jump out, mainly revolving around clarity and actionability of the company’s message in the opening sections, and some minimal technical details such as WCAG color contrast requirements not being met.
While small, this is an important consideration for a web-design and development company that would be expected to be technically perfect.
Stakeholder interviews and research revealed that there are 4 key areas of focus:
UI: changing the UI to reflect a sophisticated boutique feel
Establishing Trust: transparency, competency and reputability are sufficiently transmitted
UX/Logic of site: ensuring home sections and other pages are presented in the most UX friendly order
Funnelling: ensuring each page includes CTAs or breadcrumbs that lead to further site exploration
Solutions for improvement were sorted accordingly into each of these four key categories.
Identifying these key priorities, and then organizing ideas to fit into them, ensures that the possible solutions, and therefore the project, remain focused.
I used an Effort-Impact matrix to sort and prioritize improvements. The resulting priorities were:
This Hero section redesign navigates the line between the restrictions (low-effort, no major UI change or re-brand) and the ideated solutions.
Without even changing the content, there’s a lot that can be changed to improve the UX of the home page.
A key concern uncovered in the stakeholder interviews was that a lot of users reached the website through organic social media leads and would therefore enter the site through blog posts or similar. The current Blog post entries successfully funneled users by suggesting exploring related case studies, but lacked a way to access the collection of articles, which I added.
I also added CTAs to give prospective clients the option to view all projects, or to view the services provided.
I presented the above findings and recommendations to the stakeholders. In addition to the solutions illustrated above, I also suggested:
I made a very convoluted journey-map (not included here) to help me visualize user flows, using FigJam. While this was useful to organize and understand the flow of information, making a digital one wasted time where a rough, hand sketched one would have served the same purpose.
Time limitations are always a factor. While I included the recommendation for building a contact page in order to increase transparency and clarity, I didn’t have time to build a high fidelity prototype of this. With more time, I would have liked to have included this in the finalized project.
At the time of this project, my confidence in my UI skills and in my authority to suggest UI changes was significantly lower, so I kept UI improvements to a strict minimum. With more experience and confidence, I would give some further UI recommendations.
Since this project, I have conducted a more extensive Competitor Analysis review (view it here). An important insight I took away from this is that industry giants such as Pentagram and Attic Salt are generally not a good source of inspiration. That’s because, being so renown, they rely on their reputation to communicate, and do not use the website to express their personality. In a way these sites leave a very corporate impression which works well for a company that is large and known, but less so for companies trying to distinguish themselves.