Lighting Plus

We have a long established working relationship with Lightingplus and have been collaborating with their designer since 2010, coding their site, maintaining it and developing new features. Almost 10 years later this website was still serving them well. In 2019 we received the new design concepts and re-built lightingplus.co.nz on our new CMS.

Undertaking a major site redesign is a daunting task, especially if you are a long-established retail site taking 1000s of orders every month. Loyal customers, that have used your website for years, don’t always react well to change. We experienced some negative feedback when the new site went live but read on to understand how we were able to support Lightingplus and help them weather this brief storm.

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The Mission

Lightingplus were running a number of different websites and their main retail site was not responsive. They had a dedicated mobile site which was the norm back in 2010 but in 2019 was an outdated solution.

Our primary objective for this project was to deliver a single, fully responsive website. The in-house designer at LightingPlus would be producing the designs for the new site and would act as creative lead for this project.

Working with another designer can be challenging but we were able to feedback on the designs and make recommendations for any changes we felt would improve the user experience. We took on a consultant role during the design process to guide the designer around some of the more complex UI and design patterns such as cart and checkout pages.

Our mission was to ensure the new site was coded well, was faithful to the designs we were given and performed well across all devices. We built the new website on our new CMS which offers a much higher level of control over the much older version that was still in use.

The Outcome

We coded the supplied designs and translated these responsively so that we kept a consistent style across all device sizes. This involved some additional UI design work on our part but we followed the styling of the supplied designs to make sure the extra layouts we designed blended in seamlessly. It’s often easier for us to do this as we have the experience and knowledge of best practices that should be used for smaller devices such as smartphones and tablets. We were able to share our progress on this work via a development site which acted as a staging site for testing ahead of the final go live.

Delivering this new website on our new CMS meant the client could very quickly update content and make global changes across the site.

The fully responsive solution has meant customers have a seamless user experience across devices for the first time. This is especially important as it means customers viewing a Lightingplus advert on TV could access the site immediately on their smartphones and enjoy the same user experience as the desktop site.

The Impact

As mentioned above, the initial launch was met with pushback from some users. The majority of complaints came from a specific user type, those who use the website to buy products on behalf of clients. The pain point here was they were used to regularly purchasing products and felt disconnected with the updates made to the product filtering. The general public were also unhappy that so many products were missing photos or were not available at all. We had councelled against going live until all of the content had been added to the new website.

The first issue was addressed by understanding exactly which parts of the purchasing process were causing headaches. We revised the product filter logic and updated how this functioned on the live site.

Our approach to post go-live issues was an agile one. We were flexible and responsive to the client and user needs, iterating solutions and making incremental updates to the site in response to feedback.

In a very short time we were able to course correct and prioritise the actions that had to be taken and with everything on an even keel the client could then focus on populating the last of the products to address the missing photos.

The site performance has greatly improved with the new website. Page load speeds have been slashed and the new cart/checkout system is much better with new features such as a bulb selection modal adding a fluidity to the process that has seen a reduction in cart abandonment.

Services

Project Planning & Management
User Experience (UX) Design
User Interface (UI) Design
Development
Custom Content Management System (CMS)

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