The Malt Miller – UX updates

Three years is a long time in the world of the web. Technologies change, design trends shift, devices get cleverer and users expect you to keep up. Many of our clients have been with us for much longer than this, and we like to ensure we keep their sites up to date and following good practice trends.

Over the summer we set about looking at ways in which we could improve several areas of the Malt Miller website, given that our last major update was almost three years ago. We considered:

• The design: what changes can we make to keep the site modern and contemporary?
• The user experience (UX): what can we change to improve the user experience, encourage more people to use the site and keep them engaged when they arrive?
• SEO: How can we improve our SEO to attract new visitors to the site?
• Usability & functionality: How can we make the site more usable for new and experienced brewers alike?

We used a combination of questionnaires, focus groups, usability testers and expert analysis to document our findings and suggestions.

Our report began with an analysis of pages and posts to see which were (and which weren’t) both drawing and keeping traffic. We looked at conversion rates and revenue per page when it was a landing page for visitors. We discovered things we suspected (that product pages, when functioning as a landing page, were the second most profitable page type in the site) and things we didn’t know (they also had a very high bounce rate). We looked at how long people stayed on the site, which pages they went to (and didn’t go to), the differences in purchasing patterns between desktop and mobile, and considered why people who landed on certain pages didn’t go on to make a purchase.

We made several suggestions for change which we hoped would address some of the issues we identified – some of these were quick wins and some were more involved, but the Malt Miller team liked our ideas and asked us to implement almost everything in our report. This included:

• A site-wide design facelift, incorporating:
  • A new design for e-commerce category pages to more effectively engage users.
  • Design changes to the way products were displayed, aiming for more uniformity across the site.
  • Design improvements on mobile, particular around the purchasing funnels.
• User experience (UX) changes to the header, menus and navigation to promote key content such as the recipe generator and to bring more content above the fold on smaller screens.
• User experience changes to the basket and checkout page, streamlining the route to checkout.
• Creating a knowledge base and arranging blog posts by category and type. This allowed Malt Miller to create a section entirely devoted to new brewers, full of videos, how-to’s and blog posts making them the go-to destination for people starting their new hobby.
• Optimising meta titles and descriptions across product ranges for improved SEO.
• Modifying on-page titles & descriptions to make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
• A new shop structure to reduce the number of choices on complex category pages.
• An updated interface for the recipe generator.
• Improvements to the homepage to advertise special offers and new products.

Keeping your site evolving, up-to-date and always focusing on the needs of your users is essential to stay ahead of the competition. If you think we can help, please do get in touch.