BraunAbility.com site improvements

UX Design - UI Design - Accessibility Testing

The Project

BraunAbility.com is the website for the factory at BraunAbility. I make that distinction to mention that while the goal is to get people into a wheelchair accessible vehicle that works best for them, selling directly to them was not an option. For every customer we had to connect them to a dealer as seamlessly as possible. This was a series of one off requests, but as a design team of one I decided to put them all into one case study.

Research

With the limited resources I had to get creative with the research I was able to accomplish. I completed heuristic evaluations on the pages with the most traffic that aligned with the goals set forth by leadership. Our primary goal was to increase the sites market share with a secondary goal to increase the form conversion rate of the site. I also completed accessibility audits to both help the end user as well as increase the seo market share. Another avenue I took was to use CrazyEgg to help sell leadership on navigational changes through the use of heat maps and screen recordings. I leveraged the customer experience team as well as an on site survey tool to get direct customer feedback.

Solutions

There were a lot of inconsistencies, coupled with readibility issues, so I first addressed those by creating a UI kit as well as make sure there was proper visual hierarchy across the site. Things like a max width on content went a long way in improving the user experience as well as making it easier to design for larger screens to save time. I worked with the dev team to fix tab indexing and aria tags for an accessibility enhancement. On the inventory pages, I made the change from infinite scrolling to pagination to help with page load speeds and give users more control to skip around based on how they sorted their search results. I designed a new component that allowed users to rotate and interact with new vehicles to help them feel more connected to the vehicles without having to go into a show room. This helped especially during the height of covid shutdowns. I also worked with dealers who didn't want to show prices on the site to convince them that people will go to their competition before they'll call just to get a price.

Outcomes

By making these changes and others, along with the help of the dev team and content folks, we were able to increase the SEO market share from just over 20% to over 38% which exceeded the goal set out by leadership which was tied to everyone's bonus. We also improved the bounce rate on inventory pages from ~40% to just under 7% which was a better than expected outcome.