eXperient Interactive

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Ballard Designs

Challenge

Ballard Designs is a premier multi-channel retailer of unique European-inspired home furnishings and accents. Ballard came to eXperient with a specific and costly problem: The website had a low conversion rate and high shopping cart abandonment rate for its custom upholstered furniture. It also had a high number of customer support calls from people who could not complete Web transactions to purchase the furniture.

eXperient was engaged to identify the issues with the shopping experience and to create a design solution.

Solution

eXperient conducted an expert review and identified specific issues with the interaction and visual design that were making it difficult for users to identify, select and edit their custom options and purchase the furniture.

Through the redesign, eXperient improved the view of the custom options so that users understood which options they had to select. eXperient also improved the layout and interaction so that it clearly displayed that the steps and controls for choosing custom options and actually guided the user through the selection and purchase process. By making improvements to the visual design, eXperient gave more prominence to the most important features and content making them more accessible.

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City Year

Challenge

City Year is a corps of volunteers making a difference in communities throughout the U.S. In addition to its main website, www.cityyear.org, City Year also has 19 microsites maintained by local chapters.

City Year knew its Web presence needed to be stronger: They didn’t have as many visits to the site as they expected, and users who visited the site weren’t staying long. They also had feedback that users who were coming to the site looking for specific information weren’t able to find it easily, if at all. There was an added challenge of the differently designed microsites, which weren’t consistently carrying through the design or brand image of the main site.

City Year engaged eXperient to redesign the main site to increase the organization’s Web presence; to enhance the organization’s brand awareness; and to better engage and service volunteers, donors, and the general public. City Year also wanted to extend design changes to the microsites in way that they would give the local chapter the flexibility in the design to meets its own needs while clearly conveying the relationship to the main site and the brand.

Solution

The redesign was a success that exceeded even City Year’s expectations. One year after the redesign, City Year found significant jumps in unique visits, average time spent on the site, and pages viewed, as well as a reduction the bounce rate (the rate at which users abandoned the site at the home page). Usability testing indicated that users were able to find information quickly and easily using the redesigned architecture and navigation scheme.

Results One Year After Redesign*

• Unique visits: 96% increase
• Average time spent on the site: 95% increase
• Average number of pages viewed: 99% increase
• Overall number of page views: 289% increase
• Bounce rate: 34% decrease

*Data from Google Analytics, which was used to track site usage before and after the redesign.