Challenge
As UX Architect Lead I was tasked with re-designing branded user experiences for the Home Depot proprietary brands (Vigoro, Husky and Hampton Bay) using our current visual design specifications. The business goals included: creating monetization opportunity, improving SEO value, and brand loyalty/customer satisfaction. Most Home Depot customers were unaware that we even sold proprietary brands, let alone, much about them.
Design Thinking & Methodology
After meeting with the business team further, I discovered data that suggested that the user behavior was a key differentiator between these brand pages and the normal Home Depot product pages. These customers were either trying to find out more about the proprietary brand or get some other type of engagement. Unintentionally, we were causing our customers problems by not readily serving the content that was desired. We were able to boil down the user behaviors to 3 types: Educational, Navigational and Inspirational. Vigoro fits into the Educational brand page.
I completed a competitive analysis, taking a look at how our direct competitors were treating their proprietary brands, (ie Lowes, Ace Hardware and Target). I also took a look outside of main verticals exploring verticals such as news and sports.
I sketched out several interfaces, met with the product teams and editorial teams. At a high-level, I had a concept.
The big idea specifically for the educational template (Vigoro) was to create several pint-sized stories that the customer could relate to. We used common landscaping problems as the catalyst for this. We took a seasonally relative problem such as bare spots on your lawn and provided ways to combat that with Vigoro solutions. It was important not to just offer products, but also to offer original related content, such as, videos, blog post and forums topics. Telling the brand story also proved valuable. It enhanced consumer awareness of the brand, its value proposition, cross- category product breadth and SEO value.
An additional approach was to “template” these pages. Make them modular enough to support various configurations and types of content. Thus allowing Home Depot to possibly move into a future state where they serve brand pages not only for proprietary brands, but also for other commercial brands that are also sold at Home Depot.
Execution & Results
I turned my sketches and notes into wireframes and annotations. Reviewed them with several levels of management and worked with a designer and the developer to implement and test.
This project was recently released, thus, we don’t have the numbers to measure success just yet. However, internally, the product and business teams were extremely pleased with the outcome. Once metrics are attained and analyzed, we will tweak as necessary.