Creative Designs Can End The Era of Page Views!
Re-designing Turkey’s biggest technology (e-)store brought us to new conclusions.
Vatan Computer has been a key name in the Turkish tech market for over many years. It reaches out to users from almost all ages and best known for wide range of products, its online presence and the promotional deals that come along with it. The website generates an immense amount of daily traffic and is the preferred choice of majority.
Time flies, so does design!
When we sat down with Vatan a few years ago to give their website a new look, mobile trend was not a game changer. It was also the first time Vatan outsourced their web design so all steps had to be calculated and well thought out. What we did back then was to give the website a fresh look and polish the user experience. The design was successful and won local recognitions. But that’s not why we’re here. Let’s fast forward to 2016…
Mobile trend is buzzing, the majority of the websites are trying to have a responsive design and the whole world of e-commerce is heading towards a few step checkouts. When we tracked the amount of mobile traffic for Vatan, it gave us clear signals that we should sit down and do everything once again to keep the website up to date. Now bare in mind that once big companies go for a re-design, they tend to forget about it for a considerable amount of time. This proved to be a real challenge because we had to convince Vatan that a complete re-work was needed. The cherry on top was the fact that we had to re-design the website that was already performing quite well according to the visit, page view and sales.
Better the navigation better the experience
Keeping the latest trends in mind, we wanted to deliver a sustainable website that evolved around better user experience, quality and ease of access. The users should be able to navigate within menus easily and go to the checkout with no hiccups. All the while, a brighter colour palette was on our agenda and we ended up with a compact website that reflected our style: Sustainable, experience over anything and doing all of it with less components.
Page view, what? You’re becoming obsolete…
Shortly after the launch, Vatan’s overall page views were down by 15% which raised some serious eyebrows. Did we fail? Are users not liking it? What went wrong?
We started asking for feedback and dived into the numbers. Everyone around us was loving the navigation and how the website adapted itself to mobile. Guess what? Sales were the same, even increasing in some departments. Not so long after, Vatan’s sales reached a tipping point where they decided to stop using Google Ads as it had no use anymore. The amount of usage and return rate was so high enough that Vatan Computer would show up first on Google by default.
The way we designed the website implemented a sort of “all-in-one” loading process. This meant that once the website is loaded, you can swap between departments and categories without refreshing or loading another page. (See the prototype in action) The older design had at least 30% more steps until the user finally reaches the delivery page. As a result, our new design favoured the user experience over numbers of visits. On a smaller scale, the page view and maybe the amount of money generate from page views might have shrunk a small amount but the overall sales and customer satisfaction were soaring. A tough choice for many, yes, but at the end of the day, user experience and simple designs are the keys to success!
