Aspen Ski Company

Challenge

  • Appeal to an active, sophisticated, affluent audience and a youth audience
  • Promote online ticket and rental sales
  • Create seasonal skins: winter and summer

Solution

  • Modern, sophisticated look
  • Sales and tourism integrated with other information and services
  • Site graphics and content can ‘flip’ with seasonal change

Results

  • Traffic increased approximately 23 – 26% each year over a five year period
  • Online sales increased approximately 20 - 23% each year over a five year period
  • Site attracted desirable younger snowboarding demographic
  • Aspen could self-manage flipping the seasonal sites

Ballard Designs

Challenge

Ballard Designs is a premier multi-channel retailer of unique European-inspired home furnishings and accents. Ballard came to eXperient with a specific and costly problem: The website had a low conversion rate and high shopping cart abandonment rate for its custom upholstered furniture. It also had a high number of customer support calls from people who could not complete Web transactions to purchase the furniture.

eXperient was engaged to identify the issues with the shopping experience and to create a design solution.

Solution

eXperient conducted an expert review and identified specific issues with the interaction and visual design that were making it difficult for users to identify, select and edit their custom options and purchase the furniture.

Through the redesign, eXperient improved the view of the custom options so that users understood which options they had to select. eXperient also improved the layout and interaction so that it clearly displayed that the steps and controls for choosing custom options and actually guided the user through the selection and purchase process. By making improvements to the visual design, eXperient gave more prominence to the most important features and content making them more accessible.

City Year

Challenge

City Year is a corps of volunteers making a difference in communities throughout the U.S. In addition to its main website, www.cityyear.org, City Year also has 19 microsites maintained by local chapters.

City Year knew its Web presence needed to be stronger: They didn’t have as many visits to the site as they expected, and users who visited the site weren’t staying long. They also had feedback that users who were coming to the site looking for specific information weren’t able to find it easily, if at all. There was an added challenge of the differently designed microsites, which weren’t consistently carrying through the design or brand image of the main site.

City Year engaged eXperient to redesign the main site to increase the organization’s Web presence; to enhance the organization’s brand awareness; and to better engage and service volunteers, donors, and the general public. City Year also wanted to extend design changes to the microsites in way that they would give the local chapter the flexibility in the design to meets its own needs while clearly conveying the relationship to the main site and the brand.

Solution

The redesign was a success that exceeded even City Year’s expectations. One year after the redesign, City Year found significant jumps in unique visits, average time spent on the site, and pages viewed, as well as a reduction the bounce rate (the rate at which users abandoned the site at the home page). Usability testing indicated that users were able to find information quickly and easily using the redesigned architecture and navigation scheme.

Results One Year After Redesign*

  • Unique visits: 96% increase
  • Average time spent on the site: 95% increase
  • Average number of pages viewed: 99% increase
  • Overall number of page views: 289% increase
  • Bounce rate: 34% decrease

Client Quote

I hired Gregg to support a significant enhancement to our cruise retail site. Not only did Gregg provide thought leadership on creating a great user experience, he was also able and willing to articulate his understanding, thus creating a real learning environment.

On top of that, he produced high quality deliverables in a very aggressive timeline. Our project was a great success and Gregg deserves the lion’s share of the credit. I would hire Gregg again and look forward to the experience.

Caleb Munson, Cruises Only / World Travel Holdings

FAO Schwarz

Challenge

  • Customers having trouble finding products
  • Drop-off rate from shopping cart was high
  • Site and audience misaligned (kids vs. parents)
  • FAO luxury rebranding effort needed to be applied to website

Solution

  • Create a sophisticated looking site reflecting FAO’s premium image: Clean lines, bold colors, urban imagery, and a sleek type treatment
  • Design the site for the audience: parents, not children
  • Create an efficient and clear ecommerce experience, reducing the steps from 8 pages to 5 pages
  • Create alternate browse views for easy access to products

Results

  • Online sales increased 57% in the first two months
  • Site aligned with other brand media collateral

Client Quote

We thought we had a medicore screen presentation interface for our new project before we went to Gregg. We were in need of some expertise and creative thinking on how to array a huge quantity of data in a friendly, non-intimidating fashion to a diverse workforce with varying levels of knowledge.

Gregg was able to assimilate the data, design dramatically improved interfaces, and then test the prototypes on an extremely tight schedule. The results and associated learnings were nothing short of remarkable.

Rob Lippman, Senior Operations & Compliance Manager, H&R Block Bank