Architectural: UX Website Design & Ecommerce Development

The challenge

As the leading distributor for architectural self-adhesive films from key brands, 3M DI-NOC and Cover Styl’, Architextural, part of the William Smith Group 1832 Ltd, offer a huge range of surface film products used by interior designers, architects and other refurbishment related sectors throughout the UK.

With such a huge product base, they recognised that their existing site didn’t provide an effective, user-friendly platform to showcase their products. With issues surrounding product categorisation, visual imagery and no effective lead generating capability. Their existing brochure-led website felt far removed from the customer-centric ecommerce platform they knew they needed to help drive user engagement and sales.

With sound knowledge in UX design, website design and ecommerce development, they enlisted us to create an ecommerce-style platform that would deliver a sleek digital shopfront that prioritised the user throughout the lead generation funnel.

The process

Carrying out a full review of their existing website, we identified a number of functional and structural issues that were impacting user experience. These informed our decisions when mapping out the ideal customer journey to ensure it focused on user intent, be that seeking product information or ordering a sample.

Moving away from the original product catalogue structure, we reimagined their customer journey putting greater emphasis on product categorisation using logical and intuitive filters. This would allow users to shop by finishes, colours and more rather than solely by the two key brands 3M DI-NOC and Cover Styl’.

The design process also involved refreshing and reconfiguring the website layout to align with the restructured customer journey to provide a streamlined shopping experience throughout. By restructuring how products were presented on the site, we were able to improve image quality using larger product images and inspirational photos of products in situ, present key product information in a more user-friendly way, as well as allowing customers to order product samples.

Initial research into the site’s main users gave us essential insights for building a new ecommerce-style platform that enabled users to order product samples online. Redefining the content and structure of the site, the new user interface would not only provide consumers with a better browsing experience on a shoppable platform, but also enable the client more flexible backend management and analytics capabilities.

As part of the site migration process, we also needed to consider the SEO impact this could have on their website. This involved putting a robust redirect plan in place to minimise any potential risks involved in a website migration and helping to retain their existing organic search visibility.

The result

With a unified approach to website design, UX and ecommerce development, we were able to successfully build a shoppable platform for Architextural that prioritised the user journey first and foremost. In addition, the new ecommerce-style site has given them greater control and flexibility on how they monitor and manage their website moving forward, including bulk product uploads and analytic capabilities that didn’t exist on the legacy site.

From the streamlined and consistent website structure to a defined user journey that simplifies the browsing and product sample ordering process, we were able to bring Architextural’s website into the 21st century. The result is a website design that’s more in line with their products and their industry, using inspirational visual assets, informative content and a consistent website structure and branding throughout.

Designing an inspirational consumer-focused ecommerce website to improve conversions

The challenge

Tech Stack

The process

The result

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