Detailed Project Description

Phase 1: Marketing and Business Assessment
This phase formed the business context for the project and thus helped us to develop the design for the listening labs in Phase 2.

Steps included:

• Interviews of key stakeholders and managers to build the business context.
   
• Expert review of Elisabeth.com's customer experience, including such aspects as navigation, merchandising, category and product display, search results, registration, and checkout.
   
• In-depth log file analysis, which showed that website traffic patterns correlated with our expert review.

Phase 2: Listening Labs
Creative Good's version of user tests, listening labs combine the best of traditional usability research and less directive market research methods.

• 8 customers attended one-on-one sessions, each lasting 45 minutes, followed by a discussion among the client team members observing from "behind the glass."
   
• 20 Elisabeth team members attended, representing a cross-section of the organization: advertising, marketing, technology, customer service, merchandising, and the VP of e-commerce who "owned" the site.
   
• Organizational impact was significant. Several client team members claimed the labs were a transformative experience, with one saying, "I'm not going to be able to forget" the results he observed.
   
• Analysis of the lab results showed, as it often does, the "why" of the Phase 1 analysis. Customers' behavior clearly showed why they weren't able to find or buy products in many cases.
   

Phase 3: Creation of the Customer Experience Strategy
Creative Good developed a simple high-level strategy to guide the rest of the redesign project, based on everything that had come before in the project: internal research, log file analysis, the expert review, listening lab results.

• During the presentation of this strategy, the client team "bought in" to the strategy right away. This was no surprise, since the strategy was based directly on what they had observed, first-hand, in the listening labs, and on work Creative Good had delivered earlier in the project.

Phase 4: Prototyping
Creative Good created 10 to 15 pages of "wireframe" prototypes to show, tactically, how to implement the customer experience strategy in the redesign.

• Prototyped pages included the Elisabeth.com home page, category pages, product pages, and checkout. Creative Good also developed a new navigation scheme, which appeared throughout prototypes.
   

Implementation:
The Elisabeth team handed the prototypes to a third-party design firm to implement. Creative Good then took a limited role in the project, occasionally delivering ad-hoc reviews of the site as it was being implemented. These reviews ensured that the development stayed true to the customer experience strategy Creative Good developed.

Several weeks later, once implementation was complete, the new Elisabeth.com site launched, consistent with the customer experience strategy and making all of Creative Good's tactical recommendations.

As stated above, results arrived immediately upon relaunch:

• 57% increase in sales conversion
• 25% increase in average order size