ecommerce experience for complex product offerings.
thermofisher.com product catalog produces over $10 billion a year in revenue and the instrument storefronts serve as the education, consideration and decision for a diverse set of science-specific product offerings. this refresh project has provided value to users with a simplified journey and impactful content and also to the business groups with organized structure and lead generation.
my role. ux design. ui design. art direction. creative direction. brand strategy. digital marketing. ia. project management.
problem.
With lack of governance over time, the thermofisher.com experience had become difficulty to navigate and the designs and content usage was inconsistent and not utilizing best practices and methods for conversion. Some other pain points of the website include non-responsive design, images not dynamic or scalable for varying screen sizes, inconsistent marketing imagery usage and placement, and usage of off-brand colors and and messaging.
solution.
we re-imagined the instrument storefront experience from concept to production with the goal of delivering a customer-focused instrument selection experience with engaging rich-media, organized content, and an interactive interface. updates to content, imagery, page hierarchy, and the overall customer experience resulted in higher conversion, efficient and consistent page creation, and improved brand standards and customer satisfaction.
process.
we explored the existing content from four areas of science to cross-reference and audit the user journey, page hierarchy, and the varying usage of content, layouts, and components. This exercise resulted in a clear understanding of which components of the design system needed to be removed, enhanced, or recreated and narrowed down all of the pages used on the website to eight layouts and true templates which informed this project and future projects.
- audit of design system, information architecture, imagery, content, and brand strategy
- conceptual design utilizing existing content and proposed structure to inform content writers
- templated design of three storefronts to input rewritten content and explore design requirements.
- collaboration with business groups to finalize the storefront templates
- collaboration with development, content, marketing, and production teams to standardize experience
- creation of process, usage, imagery, and template guidelines for scalable re-production
proving the concept. after initial designs had been reviewed and direction of the templates was agreed upon, we began to input the revised content into the design. with consideration to the science-specific demographics, business objectives, and product variations, we scoped the project for three storefronts to uncover the full impact to the content layout and the design system components. attune nxt is a single instrument (small), evos cell imaging has four comparable instruments (medium), and benchtop centrifuges represents a catalog of twenty or more instruments (large).
single instrument template (one instrument). the first instrument template gave insight to the experience and provided standardization of content, messaging, hierarchy, imagery, layout and design. a consistent sub navigation was created under the hero image to encapsulate the experience which informed the nomenclature and structure of the storefront pages. overview, features, specifications, sample data, services, and resources.
view the attune nxt flow cytometry storefront
medium instrument template (two to six instruments). with an image rich system output, evos cell imaging system was an excellent storefront to validate and improve the content, design, and structure. as content variations arose, we provided additional features and components to enhance the experience – a table view for easy comparison, an image gallery for the business to display the hi-res imagery that comes from the instrument, and a selection guide for required components related to the instrument.
view the evos cell imaging systems storefront
large instrument template (six or more instruments). the benchtop centrifuge template inspired the creation of a filterable selection guide which allows users to easily scan and compare products by specifications. This newly created guide provided a vast improvement to how our customers search and purchase products from our expansive catalog.
view the benchtop centrifuge storefront
proving the concept. when the first three storefronts had come to completion we approached a fourth storefront to validate and test the templates ability to scale. this storefront was the most complex structure with twenty or more instruments and four required components relating to each instrument.
view the high performance liquid chromatography storefront
outcome.
the development of scalable templates provided a roadmap for cross-team collobartion to efficiently produce the remainder of the storefronts (170 in total). we were able to reach over the existing technical constraints and governance issues and provide more value to our users and our business groups while also contributing to the thermo fisher brand experience.
jesse anton gawlik.
user experience designer with proven ability to translate business objectives into engaging visual communication.