After six months of tests, Office Depot prepares to launch new site design
Office Depot in early December will quietly launch the first major overall update to its web site in two years, after an intense testing and development phase over the past six months, director of e-commerce strategy and customer experience Noah Maffitt tells Internet Retailer.
The new design will leverage new reporting, analytic and other capabilities the multichannel retailer has implemented on the back end over the past 18 months and apply them to the consumer interface, Maffitt says.
What site visitors will see when the new design goes live – and what some already have seen in A/B tests comparing old and new design elements on OfficeDepot.com over the past several weeks–is a site that still speeds customers to what they are looking for, but also opens pages to give Office Depot new ways to present itself and its products and services. The overall redesign builds on incremental enhancements added over the past year and a half.
“The design takes a lot of clutter out and focuses attention down to what is critical. Customers that have experienced it tell us it`s easier to use, more intuitive, and gets them to what they want with less distraction along the way,” Maffitt says.
At the same time, the new design reflects a number of strategic growth initiatives for Office Depot Inc., which is No. 2 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites. For example, it increases the page real estate devoted to promotions, particularly those demonstrating the value of the retailer’s exclusive brands. “We have some very strong promotions we’d like to get in front of customers, but those often were not readily apparent,” says Maffitt of the previous design. “But for our customer and product segment, you don’t want to create a promotional environment that distracts from the ability on the site to transact quickly, because our customers are very task-oriented. Finding that balance of increased promotionalism while maintaining high efficiency has been one of our primary objectives.”
The new design offers more areas on the site in which visitors can receive personalized content, and a framework in which OfficeDepot.com can begin to meld new geo-targeting capability it’s added on the back end with behavioral targeting, Maffitt says.
Another goal was to find a better way to expose customers to existing services, beyond office products, that tended to be buried in the site, such as its web workshops; and new services that the retailer is moving into, such as tech installation services it is starting to roll out. “We had been locked into an old way of telling our story. It was difficult for us to introduce a new service to customers,” he says, of the earlier site design. The redesign handles that with functionality that creates a richer experience on the site, Maffitt adds.
The redesign also addresses Office Depot’s increasing international business online. With more than 40 web sites in 18 countries, the retailer currently lacks a consistent online presence across countries. “We want to create a single brand experience that can service all our customers,” says Maffitt. “This is the first step to creating a design that we can employ globally.”
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