Flexible Homepage Solution.
The Challenge
An inconsistent layout that left too much room for variation created challenges for a team of designers that need to work on a single brand. At the same time, the content felt stale and repetitive and resulted in homepage designs that did not promote the brand well.
NewAge Products has a strong premium brand positioning with its high-quality niche furniture products, and we felt the homepage designs did not do it justice.
How do we solve this? We needed to design multiple templates that had room for variation and at the same time, keep the integrity of the brand.
Project Goal
Templated Homepage that accommodates Promo Events, New Products Releases, and Seasonality for an eCommerce brand.
My Role
Lead UI/UX Designer
My Responsibilities
UI/UX Research, wireframing, and prototyping
Content Framework
Before we dived into wireframing, we had to decide on the templates we needed to create. By analyzing homepage content that was produced for the recent year, we were able to bucket the content into three distinct groups: promotional events, seasonal, and new product releases.
We also mapped out where these templates often occur throughout the year.
Wireframes
The next step was wireframing, and it helped us visualize the content using low-fidelity prototypes. We were able to map out content priorities and provide directions to other teams that make sales and promo decisions.
High-Fidelity Prototype
The next step was creating a prototype that was presentable to the client and was going to establish visual rules for other designers on the team. The prototype was created for an upcoming product release that used beautiful imagery, a consistent tone of voice for messaging.
Takeaways
The new home page designs were created as master templates. The design elements formed a library of reusable web components, available for all designers on the team to use. The low-fidelity prototypes are now used by other teams to make content decisions when they are handing off requests to the Creative Team.
We have created templates that are both consistent with the brand, and visually enticing allowing the designers to mix and match the design elements.