Blum
International website relaunch
Blum is a global manufacturer of fittings for the furniture industry. They approached us to help them shape a digital strategy and as a first project rethink their global website. The project was streched over multiple years because of it´s massive size and sub-projects. I was part of the UX and the UI design team.
My Roles
User Research
Information Architecture
User Experience Design
User Interface Design
Company
21TORR
Year
2017
The Challenge
How might we offer a digital platform for carpenters?
Our client Blum approached us with their wish to relaunch their corporate website. The old website was visually and technically outdated, not responsive and their CMS couldn´t handle the expectations of their international digital strategy. The new website should act as a digital service platform for their customers.
The Approach
From wood working to the digital age
Stakeholder & User Interviews
As there were a diverse range of internal and external stakeholders in this project we developed interview guidelines for every specific group. We then conducted interview sessions at our customers headquarter in Austria with people from Product Development, Marketing and HR as well as with retailers and carpenters on-site and via video call worldwide.
Personas
To get a better and mutual understanding of the user groups we developed a set of detailed personas as a basis to guide decisions throughout the whole project.
Analytics & SEO
We conducted extensive Analytics analysis to learn about the user journeys on the Blum website and ran large SEO checks to improve the discoverability of future content. We wanted our decisions to be based and backed on a solid set of data points.
“The target groups were not exactly what you would call digital natives.”
The Process
Translating the results of user research and analysis into a user experience
We simplified the information architecture so users can find their relevant content faster.
Wireframes allowed us to iterate many different variants for the huge range of products and variants that Blum offers.
We built a responsive design system based on atomic design principles. This made sure that content elements are consistent and can be reused in different places or simply adapted as required. It also simplified the release process and integration into the new global Content Management System.
We developed the front and backend in-house based on SCRUM methodology and agile principles.
Navigation
In order to display the multitude of products in the navigation, a navigation concept was developed that allows the user to quickly and intuitively access the desired information while always keeping an overview.
Search
In our research we found out that many users prefer search over navigation because they are looking for a specific product name or download. For the best search experience we implemented a powerful search engine that offers auto-suggest, faceted search results and the possibility to search for article numbers.
Discover products
Blum products are mostly hidden in cabinets or furniture and therefore not visible. At the same time their product range is incredibly large. We wanted users to give the possibility to discover the product range online and therefore created several online specials to showroom the products.
