Nhut Trieu Portfolio

project

redesigning furniture agency website

year

2021

industry

Furniture, Agency, Luxury Design, B2B

my role

Web Design

A/B Testing

Marketing templates

team

about

I was the sole web designer for the rebranding project of the Luxury Italian Furniture Agency. The new design reduced bouncing rate, and improved user visiting time by 110%.

Background

IA, a premium furniture agency from Tuscany, serves as a vital link between their 40 European partners and customers in Asian regions. With the onset of Covid-19, there has been a notable increase in demand for online materials over traditional catalogue requests.

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Problem space

Established in 2008, the company's information-centered website style has limited its ability to reach a diverse range of customers beyond its existing client base. As the business continues to expand, a more dynamic and engaging online presence is essential, going beyond a mere list of partners or static product images.

Design challenges:

Express the company values such as What they are selling and How these products benefit their clients.
Indicate the appropriate information for each user profile.
Organize the digital establishment of the company.

Fast iterations

In spite of being given a lot of ideas and requirements, I still need to take them through some questions to defined clearly what they are capable of and what their customers looking for.

First of all, I need to understand the brief of what their business model is. Because they are a furniture agency that only provides services such as consulting and transiting the oder; and does not sell products directly.

Secondly, because they have a different flow for their markets and irregular groups of audience; therefore, their 4 targeted groups for the new website include:

Private consumer
Distributor/ Retailer
Brand collaboration
Architect & Designer

Thirdly, from my learning and as happened before, clients usually want to display all the information they have or I may call it the information-centred. In this case, I discussed with them how many parts of information they want to show which would be later added to the navigation bar and in order to not overload the users. Additionally, as their main theme is about educating users through exclusive information such as interviews with the brand’s CEOs and managers, the number of pictures should be placed at a certain level to avoid being mistaken with a usual e-commerce website.

Fourthly, luxury is the main theme of website and it involves not only the company’s identity but also their brands. Because of that, it needs to go side by side with aesthetic to match both parties and attract the users too.

According to the interviews with clients and brands, those mentioned groups above had different behaviours and different way to approach. The conducted data from this part is also used for FAQ.

Private Consumer

There is not more than 10% of this group that actually surfs the site to search for what they are looking for, but their assistants. In detail, this group includes entrepreneurs and ultra wealthy people who mostly spend thousands to millions euros for each order. Therefore, in a normal schedule, they do not have time to specify exactly what they need and ask for further information. Besides accessing via the website, they also choose to get consulted by the regional agency to find appropriate products that match their style.
In case of entrepreneurs, they are often owners of medium size businesses such as fashion shops, cosmetics and so on; and they aim to have the products as decoration rather than using it.
With ultra wealthy people, they tends to build an empire for their lifestyle like a collection for a villa in the other side of the globe.

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Distributor/ Retailer

These are the ones that would love to have the products on their stores.
They often ask for discount and catalogues.

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Brand collaboration

They are mainly the furniture brands that would like to operate in the region that the agency is working on.
They visit the website to learn about the agency’s expansion, credibility and service.
In different regions, they have their unique culture that requires studies and research. Therefore, to reduce the workload or the need of having their own team to study about that, they come to an agency that cover the sale, marketing and market analysis for them.

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Architect & Designer

Users in this group usually visits the website to inspect the product’s information such as size, weight or material condition in different countries.
They can be a student or a person working in this field.

Visual & Typo

The client wanted something bold and elegant but not outdated, so I basically chose a serif font called Hatton for the headings and the popular Roboto for the body text.

The brownie yellow was kept from their logo’s color that they would like to combine it with the black to emphasize the luxury.

Since this new version published, the site gained more traffics than usual and they even got an online order for a 10k mirror which never happened before.

My work improved not only their marketing progress but also the digital appearance. That helped them to gained more trust from their partners and clients. As the result of that, they received more posting requests from brands such as New collection update, Store opening announcement and Holiday product discounts.
According to the web’s data on Google Analytics, the most visited pages are Home, Projects and Brands. Even though these numbers could not speak for the real reason, they still indicate that the customers firstly want to know what the company is working on and how big their market is based on the number of carrying brands.
Moreover, the interaction on social media also increased and was leaded mostly from the new website compared to the old one.
The newsletter subscription was double and raising since the publishing time.

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Some side notes

As the company tried to save the cost from research and development as much as possible, all the requirements came straight forwards from the CEO to me and the web developer. I needed to proceed the rest of wireframe stage on my own and test the design step by step using Google Analytics data to achieve the most accurate outcome. For future work, I think a better explanation could help clients understand the essential role of research and UX principles that would lower the risk for their business and enhance the product’ values.