Project Summary
Savant is a Cape Cod-based Internet of Things (IoT) manufacturer of luxury smart home automation systems. The project was to design and launch a first-ever B2B eStore for their worldwide network of installers and dealers, giving them la carte order access to the materials needed for installations.
The store’s launch was initially se-service sales enablement, but was part of an overarching re-branding strategy to go downmarket to average consumers that also included a redesign of the marketing web site, a separate project that I also led.
My Role
As Lead UX I was responsible for orchestrating 2 main pieces of the overall strategy.
- Design and launch the B2B eStore to enable self-service sales for their worldwide dealer and installer network.
- A redesign of Savant.com, the company’s marketing Web site to leverage the new branding and move down field to average consumers.
On both of these projects my role was Information Architect and project management lead, designing the site experience and coordinating in-house and 3rd party resources. I created documentation in Word and wireframes in Omnigraffle, while marketing handled final content. A contract visual designer did the look-n-feel treatments shown here.
Complete specifications and wireframes for the Savant eStore (PDF)
Challenges/Solutions/Results/Lessons Learned
Many of the challenges of this project are in line with the ones mentioned in working simultaneously on the Savant.com marketing web site redesign. But there were a couple here worthy of mention:
- Content is King. Getting the content assets, both product details and imagery in the proper tone, style and format, was a challenge since much of this information was not easily portable. This required the business lead to enlist customer support and marketing in finding and collecting, and digitizing the content in a machine-readable format that would power the new site. It also made the task of designing before the content a necessity due to the timeline. As any designer worth their salt will tell you, having access to the final or at least real/actual content details is essential to hitting the mark. We would rather have a true reference any day than substitute Lorem Ipsum text because it just makes sense to be as realistic as possible, and to be able to understand how content will play and interplay within the design. So having the content ahead of time and ahead of the design would have been ideal.
- All vendors are not created equal. While we were enlisting the help of the best of the best, Ammunition and Konrad, to handle the brand and marketing strategy as well as the marketing web site redesign, Savant chose to not use them to build out the store functionality. Working with the existing vendor who had created the original marketing web site posed challenging. While they did have experience in e-commerce, something of this scale seemed more than their Dev team had handled before, so communication was more intensive, and ultimately code quality turned out to be at least initially sub-optimal. Rendering issues, alignment, and performance issues abounded throughout the site in the first few week after launch that I feared would affect user confidence in the site but they were eventually resolved and able to stabilize the 1st gen store site.
- Setting expectations across the board is crucial. There’s a well-known axiom about meetings in that even with the best intentions, people often walk away from them with somewhat different understandings, expectations, and opinion. When there are a lot of moving parts and timelines, things like setting an agenda and running meetings, steady, consistent, regular, and clear communication, taking notes, being participatory and asking questions,, and documenting decisions for everyone involved is essential. You can also definitely over-communicate too and you’ll never be assured that everyone is on the same page for every circumstance but doing these things goes a long way to keeping the train on the tracks and the project rolling to success.
- It’s important to celebrate wins. A lot of the work we do in tech goes live without much fanfare or celebration. When a difficult feature is completed, a confusing conversation is clarified that moves the ball forward, when long-running projects launch without negative feedback and some acknowledgement of success, it can become easy to move on to the next thing, not acknowledge the work that went into get there. There need not be over the top about it, but it’s important for teams to take a moment, maybe raise a glass or two in cheers to each other and take a moment to reflect, be honest with themselves and others about what worked and what didn’t and how they might approach similar circumstances differently the next time (yes, post mortem), and give praise when it’s deserved or earned. There was praise at Savant for the work done at a personal level, but the business just seamlessly moved on to the next set of priorities. And in some places I’ve worked the post mortem can seem awkward or at worst, a time-waster, or it become too intense as most difficult conversations often are to start. But each time it gets easier, people become more familiar with each other and their ways of working, and over time it creates trust and relationships that can help down the road especially when problems get tough this effort to look back and see where we landed, and try to do better the next time around is time well spent.
Complete specifications and wireframes for the Savant eStore (PDF)