Creating the Purr-Fect New Website for a Popular Pet Product Brand
Redbarn Pet Products Website Design & Development
OVERVIEW
Redbarn is a family-owned pet product producer dedicated to providing healthy, wholesome, and innovative food, chews, and treats for dogs and cats. The company was started by two childhood friends just wanting to give their dogs the best, and now has grown into a family of 500+ members offering over 200 types of food, treats, and chews. They consider pets to be members of the family, and therefore, they deserve nothing but the highest quality products. Their goal is to provide products pet parents can trust and feel good about giving to their furry family.
KEY ACHIEVEMENTS
+31%
Sessions+43%
Organic search traffic+30%
Pageviews+50%
Mobile trafficSince pets can’t speak for themselves, it is Redbarn's mission to educate pet parents and provide them with high quality natural products.
Discovery
Redbarn came to us in need of a complete website transformation. Their old website design was not usable on mobile devices, which is extremely important to stay competitive in today’s pet product industry. In addition to mobile optimization, their website needed a lot of work to provide a more engaging user experience. It was a clutter of content, which required us to call upon our inner Marie Kondo.
During the discovery phase, we interviewed the key stakeholders and conducted a complete audit of their current site to outline several goals for the redesign. One goal was to increase engagement and the length of time visitors spent on the website. Another goal was to give people a reason to come back on the site, increasing the number of returning visitors. A third goal was to make it easy for visitors to find the right product for their pet and drive them to purchase.
One of the things we learned during the discovery process was the important role Redbarn took in educating pet owners about what’s best for their pets by providing a wealth of information on their blog. Unfortunately, the layout of the blog was confusing, crowded, not aesthetically pleasing, and was hard for the reader to navigate to discover new content.
before
UX Strategy
Clearly understanding and outlining the goals of the redesign, we began the UX strategy phase. Since one of their goals was to create a more engaging user experience, we planned interactive features that would engage, educate, and help their visitors to find the right products for their pets.
One interactive feature we planned out was a fun product picker quiz that helped visitors find customized product recommendations, based off of their pets’ focus areas, personality, and flavor preferences. We also strategized to included a smart store locator to show visitors where they could purchase desired products, suggested related products, and incorporated social proof through reviews.
We thoughtfully mapped out the entire user journey so a cohesive story would be formed while navigating through the different pages on the site. Using wireframes as “blueprints”, we were able to quickly verify and tweak our strategy for optimizing the user experience.
Build
We jumped into applying design styles to the wire frames to give some form to the function. The redesign of the website aligned with Redbarn’s desire to unveil a modified brand identity. Collaborating with their marketing team, our designers successfully integrated refreshed brand assets, capturing the brand’s personality into the new interactive designs.
Using the latest responsive technology, we developed the site to enable all visitor experiences to be cohesive and fluid across all devices – whether they’re viewing it on a TV, desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile phone.
Next, we built our custom site designs on top of a WordPress CMS platform. With our development team’s organization and thoughtfulness, the redesigned backend is straightforward and user friendly, creating an effortless and stress-free experience for Redbarn employees to perform updates to the site.
We integrated Yotpo to pull customer reviews onto product pages, and integrated a third-party store locator to allow users to easily find where they could purchase any product.
One of the more challenging tasks was developing the product picker quiz. We custom-programmed this interactive and engaging quiz, asking the visitor various questions and displaying the personalized product recommendations at the end.
Lastly, Redbarn has a lot of products. Knowing how long it would take them to create individual products and input the necessary content for each, we decided it would be best if we worked together to bulk upload the products. We provided Redbarn with a spreadsheet template so they could fill in all the necessary info for all products, and we were able to batch process them into the site.
Test & Launch
Once all of the content was successfully added to the site, we were able to start testing everything. With a fully responsive interactive site, we needed to extensively test each page and feature to verify the correct functionality of the entire site. We ensured that everything was displaying as it should and that all of third party integrations were working successfully.
After completing our test, we walked the Redbarn team through the backend showing them how to add, edit, and customize the content and images throughout the site in the future. Once they conducted their own comprehensive review of the site, we launched the site on the client’s server!
Closing Thoughts
Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love for what you are doing. All of this is reflected in the success of the newly redesigned website. With everything wrapped up, looking back at the journey shows us the true magic of what we do here; crafting (digital) happiness – one wagging tail at a time!
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