The Client

Zinus is an e-commerce company that sells mattresses (bed-in-a-box), bed frames and beds. Their goal is to evolve into a full household furniture and lifestyle brand.

The Brief

The original Zinus site was spun up to support a business strategy shift from OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) to direct-to-consumer retailer. As a result, the web experience lacked basic e-commerce user and customer experience principles, and had a back-end system that didn’t support their marketing needs.

The goal of the project was to redesign and rebuild Zinus.com to create an engaging, responsive e-commerce site that supports their sales goals and Zinus’ expansion in the market.

Audience

New and existing customers.

Solution

• Created a new taxonomy structure to allow for clear navigation and tagging across the site.

• Completely overhauled the site with a new layout, content strategy, and visual design.

• Pushed the limits of Shopify (an e-commerce platform) to achieve custom solutions and a robust tagging and filtering system.

Client: 
Zinus

Business Model: 
B2C

Team:
  •  SEO – Phoebe Fasulo
  •  Strategy – Jill Grozalsky
  •  UX – Jess Chow
  •  Visual Design – Sarah Fuller
  •  Copy – Tim Helmers
  •  Front-end Dev – Colby Cook, Andrew Starkey
  •  Motion Graphics – Jared Flynn
  •  Production – Kristen Todd
  •  Account – Chelsie Patterson

UX Deliverables:
  •  Digital Experience Strategy
  •  Heuristic Analysis
  •  Content Inventory
  •  User Journey
  •  User Flows
  •  Sitemap & Taxonomy
  •  Wireframes
  •  Functional Specification

Approach

To start off the project, the team strategist, SEO specialist and I needed to gain an in-depth understanding of Zinus' current brand experience, who their users are, and how they are positioned in the industry. We created a "Digital Experience Strategy" deck that outlined our findings, which included the following:

• A heuristic analysis of the existing Zinus.com.

• Traffic and keyword ranking research on Zinus.com and its direct competitors.

• A competitive analysis to look at how Zinus is positioned in the bed-in-a-box mattress category.

• User behavior research on e-commerce trends, buyer motivations and customer satisfaction.

In addition, I created a content inventory of the existing site, which gave me a deeper look into Zinus' online brand experience.

Key Findings

• Competitive and user behavior research uncovered that to build confidence and loyalty, a site needs to highlight reviews, customer stories, and brand/product differentiators.

• Existing product descriptions on the Zinus site are dense and repetitive.

• The existing filtering system lacked strategy and was becoming unwieldy.

• URLs are messy and unclear during filtering, showing an opportunity for clean-up.

• There is opportunity to diversify Zinus' keyword portfolio by targeting non-brand long-tail keywords, which are less competitive.

• There is opportunity to nurture customers through email and other retargeting methods.

• The blog area was not heavily trafficked; only two blog posts brought in qualified traffic.

This project was an inter-agency effort that required close collaboration between our team and the Jack Morton team, who were responsible for the overall marketing strategy for Zinus (beyond the website).

With the support of my team, I led multiple workshops with both the client and Jack Morton:

• Findings & Direction Workshop with Zinus
  This workshop consisted of interactive exercises where all participants were probed their thoughts on competitive and aspirational websites to foster inspiration.

• Genuine/Jack Content Workshops
  These collaborative workshops consisted of a hands-on exploration and mapping exercise with Jack Morton on the new site structure and user flows, as well as a brainstorm session on the "Zinus story" to uncover brand differentiators.
   

User Journey & User Flows

The strategist and I collaborated on building upon personas that the Jack Morton team had put together. To better understand our users' behaviors and to identify important touch points on the new Zinus.com site, we created a 360º user journey and user flows for the three personas, and mapped each action in their flow to where they are in the customer purchase loop/funnel, in order to uncover areas that require targeted messaging or appropriate calls-to-action.

Experience Pillars

The tone of voice, differentiation, and desired interaction on the website were established through experience pillars, providing a solid foundation for the website design. I defined these through a deep dive into Zinus' new brand, their competition and their aspirational goals.

Sitemap & Taxonomy

I then defined a new information architecture for the site - one that focused on Zinus' product portfolio by surfacing product categories in the main navigation. I also redefined the taxonomy system for the new site to ensure that users can find and filter products in an intuitive manner.

Template Identification

Afterwards, I identified and established clear objectives for 10 templates for the new site, so that the wireframes I create will clearly meet user needs and business requirements.

Interactive Wireframe Prototypes

Working very closely with the visual designer and copywriter on my team, we wanted to brainstorm a creative experience that pushed the envelope and placed Zinus in the forefront of the bed-in-a-box industry. We defined and designed a total of 10 templates, and with the following key templates, we were able to realize and accomplish our vision:

1. Homepage

2. Quiz

The homepage experience that we created told their brand story and highlighted points of differentiation, with calls-to-action to product categories interwoven in order to continually drive conversion. See our homepage concept here. With the help of our motion graphics artist, this page came to life through site animation.

We found in our initial research that many users faced a big problem during their search for a mattress: they are unsure what mattress is right for them. Our idea of a mattress + bed quiz aimed to solve this. See wireframe of quiz template here.

To hand off to the development team, I put together functional specifications that clearly defined the intended functionality of each element on every template, in a component-based approach.