*Note: this site is still under production.  It will be going live early April 2018.  Therefore, I’m showing only what I deem proper to share at this time.

Goals

Competitive analyses and heuristic evaluations showed the site suffered in trust and credibility, navigation and architecture, visual design, and poor homepage usability.  Therefore, our goals were:

  1. Create a smaller taxonomy and stronger architecture
  2. Design a new product catalog experience
  3. Design a more engage and modern interface
  4. Bonus: Rebrand!

Taxonomy and Information Architecture

The Autoquip site had content organization and URL problem built up over time from a very large product catalog of some 1,000+ models.  Most of these model pages had several different URLs. We deconstructed the entire site and taxonomy, and built up a leaner architecture with a much smaller taxonomy.

Old Sitemap Deconstruction
New Sitemap

 

An example of leaner architecture, is the reduction of categories.  Analytics and usage research allowed us to go from 14 product categories to choose from, to eight.

Old Site Categorization
New Site Categorization with added visiuals

User Experience Design

We worked from a global view of the site and narrowed our scope to individual tasks in order to discover what interactions were needed.  These tasks were listed out and tested.  We then moved into wire frames, and retested multiple interactions and functions.

AQ_Full Site_Workflows
User Task Ideation and creation
AQ_Full_Site_Prototyping_xd
Product wireframing and prototyping
Product Catalog Customer Experience

Research and analysis focused our attention to the shopping experience.  The product search capabilities were the poorest feature of the old site, but the most used.  Thus, I designed a new product catalog that married the product catalog and all filtering and comparison functions, helping make the use of the catalog more intuitive.

AQ_Product Catalog Flows
Product Catalog user flow road map for development team
Old Category Page Layout
New Category Page Layout

Final site design

Autoquip.com now has the look and capability to its website that is reflective of their 70 plus years of industry expertise and leadership.  Below are full screen design mockups only, since the site is still under development.

AQ_Full_Product Page
Product Page_Mockup
AQ_Full_Homepage
Homepage_Mockup

 

Branding

Although, my main focus on Autoquip  was to design the user experience of the website, I worked on the early stages of their brand design, and created the first concept of the final mark.

Autoquip_Logo_Design

The mark evokes upward movement and stability; reflecting the strength and dependability of Autoquip’s products.  It also helps that it reflects and “A” like shape.