CharBroil Grills

This was a soup-to-nuts redesign that included a site audit, search, content strategy, and user experience role. I partnered with Thoughtworks Development and the business’s brand and PR agency to fully design and develop a brand new site.

View Site

Role

Content Designer
SEO
UX writer

Tasks

Site Audit
Branding
Content Strategy
User Experience
Content Marketing
Content Development

Team

Char-Broil Digital Staff
Thoughtworks

Observations

My initial audit brought to light the many flaws with the company’s old site, including bad taxonomy, outdated imagery, poor customer service experience, and sub-par usability. I detailed my findings in an extensive report.

Question

The biggest issue was the effort it would take to create content from scratch, including 3d product imagery, reviews, videos, and a Learn section of content that helped drive leads to the site.

Hypothesis

Though initially I was brought on for a content strategy involving their help section, I ended up staying with the business to help develop the entire site. There wasn’t one area where they didn’t need a complete overhaul of the experience.

Experiment

It took a massive scoping effort to work out which sections to tackle first. Their development team worked agilly, so we began with the content and design that most impacted the company. A huge part of their revenue went to customer service calls, so we started by creating basic help videos first.

Analysis

It’s a no brainer that after the redesign, the entire experience improved for their grillers.

Conclusion

After the redesign, the companies ecommerce revenue rose almost 60%, bringing the company their first year of profits in a decade.

Formula

Search & Discovery

Revamping of social content strategy and blog to generate leads.
Inspire user generated post-purchase reviews.

Mobility

Create a responsive site with mobile CSS styles.

Organization & Structure

Create consist navigation
Use image-based navigation for products, troubleshooting, and repair
Use search terms for nomenclature
Create user journey-based navigation, i.e., inspire, lead, inform, help, and maintainence

Brand & Engagement

Differentiate product through voice, design, and experience
Show product benefits
Create a compare and contrast model experience
Use up-to-date product imagery with a 360 view
Add humanity to the site

Purchase Experience

Include accessories and related how-to articles on product pages
Bundle similar products and colors
Create a contrast comparison experience
Make the product spec copy friendly and remove the technical language

Support

Create how-to videos
Group questions under categories, instead of requiring users to hunt and peck through FAQ’s

Loyalty

Create a community for users to share stories
Give users a personalized experience
Bringing in Grilling influencers to help foster longevity with the site and create an additional positive brand experience

Process

Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit laborum. Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis.

Samples

Included are a few work samples to help showcase project efforts.

Wireframes

I created low-fidelity wireframes to help designers and developers with content priorities and placement within sections.What you see featured is the Charbroil community and a sample home page.

Products & Support

Here’s a quick glance of the home page, the product page and the support page. On the live site, they’ve since morphed multiple times. But you can see how reviews were included on products, how similar products were coupled and how related content and accessories were added to the experience, as well as how-to articles.

Observations

My learnings from this massive project.

01

I'm a grilling expert

Prior to taking on this effort, I knew zilch about grilling. After writing all the learn content, I could easily become a full-time BBQ master.

02

A great team produces great results

To date, Char-Broil is one of my favorite clients. Their fluidity and resolve to fix issues and snags along the way was a true rarity in this industry. There were no big egos in this assignment. We all worked together like a well-oiled machine. And the result shows.

03

Ecommerce sites must comply with Google and Amazon's shopping experience

My user shopping journey research proved to be correct in that, people do most of their online shopping through search and giant retailers. If your search terms and experience doesn’t match up, you can forget building a site altogether.

04

Private Companies Have the Least Politics

I’ve already mentioned how pleasant my experience was with this client, but I think it’s worth a mention that smaller, private companies don’t have the same politics as someone of my giant corporate clients do. I think that’s a result of removing the aspect of fear from the equation. In corporations, job loss or promotability is more ingrained, because profits are considered more than people.

Results

Increase in ecommerce revenue

Site engagement

Customer Sevice Call costs

Feedback

“Aimee’s ability to understand the web content challenges facing us from an “in the weeds” perspective were invaluable. We had the pleasure of working together during several projects during a larger website redesign at Char-Broil. I was particularly impressed by Aimee’s ability to routinely go beyond the surface level issues at hand, investigate and prescribe a solution that would help create efficiencies or scalability. Aimee’s knowledge, hard work and sense of humor along the way was a great addition on our project. She undoubtedly would be a great additional to any team or project.”

Matthew Weiss

Ecommerce Manager, CharBroil

Begin a new quest with Twist