Arighi Bianchi
Revitalising an online shopping experience and empowering content creation teams
Arighi Bianchi is one of the countries original luxury home furnishing stores, renowned for their handpicked products.
I led the redesign of their ecommerce website and content authoring tools. Partnering with engineering, ecommerce, and marketing teams I was responsible for experience strategy, ideation, user experience, design, and validation.
The Challenge
Online, Arighi Bianchi’s ecommerce store wasn’t matching up to their unique instore experience. Our goal was to modernise and elevate the shopping experience, create a new visual language that reflected the instore DNA, and ultimately increase sales.
From the outset a ground up rebuild and release was not viable, instead we needed an approach that would allow us to make big changes gradually.
Defining our strategy
To establish our overall strategy I worked with the marketing and ecommerce teams to explore then define the direction of the experiences we wanted to create. Once we had a vision in place and initial ideas testing well we planned how to iteratively focus in on each areas identified.
Discovery
Insights, challenges and outcomes
I began by working closely with each of the teams to surface existing consumer insights, understand the challenges they were having with their online store and explore the seasonal retail cycles they were supporting.
Doing so enabled us to define the experience outcomes we wanted to achieve for the teams tasked with managing products and content.
Understanding shopping experiences
Early on, I wanted to discover what shoppers liked about the instore experience and how they felt this compared to the online store. By talking to customers about how they shopped and how their journey moved on and offline I started to see the gaps, opportunities, and some of the potential approaches we could take.
Leveraging data and analytics
At the same time, working closely with the ecommerce team we used Google Analytics, Hotjar and Full Story to look at data from the current site to establish a baseline for the current experience and identify which key areas to focus on.
Definition
The instore experience worked well for shoppers with specific products in mind, as well as “browsers” looking to explore, learn and be inspired. It naturally encourages them to move seamlessly between open discovery and purposeful focus. Online this just wasn’t the case.
I used this as the foundation of the design strategy. From arrival, I wanted the online experience to be inspiring and engaging, yet simple to navigate.
Fundamentally, I wanted to answer three core questions:
- How can we create a more human experience by reflecting the way visitors shop in store?
- How can we make the transition between browsing and purchasing more natural?
- What tools and authoring experience will allow the teams to easily create inspirational content and stories?
Design
It was essential to get the basics right and build the experience out from there. We needed to make improvements quickly without creating a disjointed experience, so I began by focusing on the core purchasing flows and improving the fundamental heuristics before progressively enhancing the shopping experience.
User behaviour
The data and metrics had shown that roughly half of all visitors were arriving on mobile devices but, because the existing site didn’t adapt well experience and usage was being impacted. This was very visible in the basket / checkout transaction funnel where dropout was significantly higher across all demographics.
A fully responsive experience
Optimising and enhancing the responsive experience was essential and I worked closely with engineering to ensure we could intentionally and gracefully adapt to different form factors. The result was an experience that performs for shoppers throughout each stage of their purchasing journey, on whatever device they were using.
Establishing a design language
Each season at Arighi Bianchi has a distinct personality and branding that we wanted to give more presence online. Partnering with marketing I established a design language rooted in simplicity which, whilst placing products front and centre provides space for their seasonal character to shine through.
Designing content creation tools
Introducing and surfacing more seasonal content whilst enhancing the responsive experience brought its own challenges as authors needed to be able to easily create and art-direct content across multiple device sizes.
I worked closely from discovery to delivery with the content teams to ensure the custom CMS tool we were developing aligned with their skillsets and was simple to use.
Collaborative design
I continued to collaborate with the teams on the authoring experience throughout the project as we enriched the shopping experience and introduced new capabilities and tools for designing, building, and maintaining a variety of content.
Designing a natural shopping experience
With the foundations working well our goal was to make the shopping experience more natural and similar to how we shop offline. By creating opportunities throughout the shopping experience to pair products and inspiration we wanted to blur the lines between discovery and purchasing.
Developing a content strategy
I worked closely with the teams to develop a content strategy and system of modular components that would allow them to create rich brand and category pages where they could blend content with products to inspire and focus customers whilst also improving SEO.
This approach resonated strongly with the teams as it reflected how they curated the instore experience and enabled us to start surfacing the craftmanship of their brands and their handpicked touch.
Designing the product details
Before purchasing, many customers need to touch and experience products up close instore to better understand quality, materials, and scale. To translate this online we introduced modules that would allow the team to highlight these features, expose the craftsmanship and surface the finer details.
The challenge of customisation
The diverse range of variations and customisations available for products was often creating confusion and difficulties for shoppers online which then translated into problems downstream with their orders.
Simplifying configuration
For complex products, especially sofas, there were frequent issues understanding and achieving the desired configuration. Even simple products were affected by long lead times for items that needed to be ordered on request.
After exploring and testing several approaches and factoring in technical constraints we settled on a flexible stepped approach that made each attribute and their dependencies easy to manage and understand whilst providing real-time in-situ feedback on availability and lead times.
Results
Ecommerce is ultimately a retail channel and success is measured in sales. The redesign had a very positive impact on the shopping experience with both orders and key metrics steadily increasing.
Within 18 months sales had risen impressivly by over 180% and we’d been able to reduce basket drop by more than 70%.
Usage metrics showed a fabulous increase in mobile usage across the site and importantly through the basket and checkout transaction flow.
As the project progressed and the success of the work we were doing could be seen, Arighi Bianchi expanded their relationship with us to allow for a greater focus on more projects.