Over the course of 3 months, Maxim Leyzerovich and myself led the research phase for the redesign of Dewalt.com, including extensive user testing, research, and validation with thousands of Dewalt customsers. Our thoughtful research based approach resulted in a website redesign that has dramatically increased engagement and achieved or exceeded the KPIs targeted at the beginning of the project.
My role:
Lead UX Designer
nclud
2015
DEWALT, one of the largest and most respected power tool manufacturers in the world, approached our studio to lead the user experience research and testing of a complete redesign of their primary website, dewalt.com. The project was backed by an extensive discovery process, with a focus on journey development and an emphasis on global multi-platform design.
Dewalt's product website was failing to reach and engage with many of its important customer audiences. The existing website was designed for the pro tool user, but DIY-ers make up about 50% of tool purchasers. The brand was also struggling to reach younger and more diverse demographics, which would make up the majority of Dewalt future users.
To tackle these challenges we created a comprehensive research plan to reveal the insights needed for a successful redesign.
Through a variety of research methods (see above) we gathered insights about Dewalt customer audiences, competitors, and the existing website to help us understand and map the problemns with the website and uncover new ideas.
We looked at three main questions when embarking on our content audit. Where is the current content providing a full customer experience? Where is content holding the customer back? What content needs to be in place in order to have a successful site launch?
With our insights from the customer interviews, site audit, and benchmark, we established a project vision and set of values that would help us continue to drive the project forward.
Responsive – a quality experience no matter what device or where you are accessing it from.
Discovery– show users what they want before they even know that they want it.
Context – learn and recognize who the user is and what they might want in order make their experience personal and smart.
Search – convert guesses into answers, and specifics into results: get people where they want to go.
SEO– own the tool namespace so users (re)turn to DEWALT first.
Service – make service a natural step in the lifecycle of a product; just as easy as buying the tool itself.
Along with these values we identified the key gaps in the user exprience that should be addressed in the website redesign.
Our research efforts culminated in a comprehensive findings and strategic recommendations document that was presented to key stakeholders within Dewalt. The findings informed the subsequent user experience phase of the project by serving as a constant guidepost to validate our approach as we worked with Dewalt to develop strategies and solutions for the new website.
The resulting wireframes, designs, and eventual launch of the website yielded a totally new experience for Dewalt customers. Since launch the new website has dramatically increased engagement and achieved or exceeded all project KPIs that were defined in the early stages of the engagement.
