Rexel Homepage Redesign
Rexel is world-wide distributor of electrical supply and equipment. As with most traditional b2b industries, Rexel was challenged in a digital sense. The conventional approaches to servicing our customers through sales and support were being disrupted by smaller more digitally savvy distributors. In acknowledgment of the digital competition, Rexel decided to commit more to its digital presence and an e-commerce team was formed. This sounds like a great start, but where would we begin?
We established users who research online and purchase offline shared more of their wallet. On average, this share was 8 times more than customers who interacted with us through traditional channels.
When we coupled this data with our customer journey data, a clearer picture began to emerge. We knew the entire experience needed a refresh, but the key was targeting specific features and areas of the experience to help make a big impact. One of those key areas was our homepage.
Removing clutter and increasing prominence led to a 7% increase in search engagment.
The value of Search
Through our data analysis, we knew users who use search converted significantly higher. In some cases, it we saw a 12% increase. Next step: how do we increase our search engagement?
Through some iterative design and AB testing, we figured out a few ways to increase engagement.
Test 1: How do we increase search engagement from the homepage? Our control design placed product category dropdown menus just below the search bar. We felt this burdened our users with unnecessary decisions when beginning their product research journey from the home page. Our test combined product categories into a single dropdown and relocated them to the left of the search bar. The design provided a clear and concise path for users who wanted to engage search. Our design netted a 7% increase in search engagement from the home page.
Self Service interactions
Through our customer journey data we knew another primary homepage objective centered around post purchase interactions. Instead of dropping users into a typical "my account" experience, we wanted to surface specific post purchase activities to the home page to allow users quick access to desired self service interactions.
Test 2: How do we increase post purchase interaction engagement from the home page? Our control design provided users with a single link to the account section of the website. Our variant provided users with 4 links to specific account features upon singing in asynchronously. We surfaced our most popular features: order status, invoices, product lists, and saved carts. We did not net a significant increase in engagement, but the feature provided much delight during user testing. In addition, we did see a significant increase in sign in. Our homepage sign in engagement jumped 4% In the end we found a feature that provided delight and improved our personalization opportunities by increasing sign in engagement.
Upon sign in, this tile exposed quick links to self service interactions.
User testing
Our next step involved stitching together a design based on customer journey maps and AB test data. According to our tests, we found ways to increase engagement in features that were targeted through customer journey data. Now it was time to make sure all of these data points an features worked together harmoniously for our users.
Test 3: User testing. Is our new design usable? We were now ready to test a very informed design. With all of the groundwork in data, our initial design tested very well with our users. Users were able to access common tasks with ease and we adjusted the design where needed. An adjustment was support information. We found our users had a hard time locating contact information, so we quickly iterated during user testing and found a way for our users to access that information with ease.
In the end our design increased engagement for key areas of our user's journeys while positively impacting business goals. Our home page bounce rates also decreased even while our marketing teams increased their campaign presence with Google. And most importantly, we produced a design that tested significantly better overall with our users.
