Lowe’s had a significant number of content-rich blog posts that offered home renovation guidance and step-by-step instructions, but the articles weren’t effective at encouraging visitors to shop on Lowes.com. The articles also weren’t responsive for mobile devices – in fact, they were hidden from search results for users on mobile devices.
Services
UX Design
SEO
My approach
I was the UX lead for the project, working alongside a production designer, a PM, engineers, writers, and a huge group of stakeholders in multiple departments. I started having weekly meetings with the entire project team because there were so many people involved that needed to be kept in the loop – sometimes we’d have 30+ people in attendance.
Here’s what I did:
- Redesigned the article templates to:
- optimize the location of links to product category, list, and/or detail pages, ensuring users could easily enter the shopping funnel.
- be responsive on mobile devices.
- optimize content for search engines (SEO).
- Created initial wireframes and a clickable prototype for usability testing.
- Conducted unmoderated usability testing via the User Testing platform, using a screener to find participants that were actively researching a home renovation project or had completed one in the past.
- Synthesized insights for usability tests and improved the designs based on the findings.
- Created wireframes to hand-off to a production designer, and a clickable prototype to show the engineers how interactive elements needed to work.
- Later, once the engineers had the designs built out, I conducted design QA to ensure everything was working as expected and reported all the many bugs/issues to fix.
Tools used:
- AxureRP for wireframes & prototypes
- UserTesting.com for usability testing
Results
At launch, subsequent visits to search pages went down by 33%, indicating that customers are finding what they need from the articles.
Visit Lowes.com to see the blog in action
Metrics
- 230% increase in conversions (# of customers who made a purchase after viewing a DIY article or page)
- 146% increase in clicks to product detail pages
- 8% reduction in bounce rate
- 35% improvement in keyword rankings (avg. position)
“Rebekah is extremely thorough and conducts research to ensure she is putting our customer first. She does a great job summarizing her research and sharing it back with the team. Her wireframes include all details and she is extremely patient with all of my questions.”
Product Manager, Lowes.com
How you can achieve similar results
UX Design
- Create a clickable prototype and wireframes to test a design solution with actual users, like I did for Lowes.com.
- Improve the design solution based on usability testing results.
- Use the updated wireframes and/or a prototype as a guide for your team to implement on your website or platform.