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 Gateway.com's customer experience, including such aspects as home page, category and product pages, navigation, and merchandising.

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."
   
• Several Gateway team members attended, representing a cross-section of the organization, including the VP of E-commerce, who "owned" the site and was the project sponsor.
   
• Analysis of the lab results showed, as it often does, the "why" of the Phase 1 analysis. Customers' behavior clearly showed why they didn't buy, and what experience they needed in order to make the purchase decision.

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, the expert review, and listening lab results.

• Creative Good worked to communicate this strategy to the design team, who were "out of the loop" due to organizational constraints. After hearing the strategy, the designers became proponents and key partners in the project, helping to push the changes through on the site.

Phase 4: Design
Creative Good worked with Gateway's internal designers to create a new buying path that was consistent with the customer experience strategy.

As stated above, results arrived immediately upon relaunch:

• 40% increase in sales conversion
• Incremental revenue increase of several million dollars per month