BT Office Furniture & Interiors supply and install office furniture throughout the UK. The company has supplied furniture to a range of companies, from small business to large PLC organisations. Their focus is on providing unparalleled value for money but without compromising quality. As part of the service BT Office provide free design and space planning services. For this project they were looking to refresh and re-platform their website prior to Magento 1.9 support ending, whilst also resolving issues with poor site speed performance, particularly on mobile.
The purpose of this project was to improve the user experience by designing a modern and intuitive, easy-to-use interface to position BT Office as the leading provider of office furniture, and better showcase the service they provide to make it clear to users that design, planning and installation are all part of the service that is provided.
BT Office compete in a space with a lot of high-end brands, and it was important that the look and feel of their new site matched that expectation from their customers, and positioned them at the same high level. When undertaking competitor analysis, we determined that the site should use white space more effectively to showcase the furniture, as on the old site a lot of the images looked cluttered and weren’t given enough space within the page.
As a client with an ongoing SEO campaign, BT Office understood the need for their new site to work for search. Working closely with our SEO specialists from the outset, we were able to determine the best approach for structuring services/products to ensure highest levels of visibility, and our discovery and planning phase provided us with insights and recommendations around user journeys and conversions so that we could best match user intent once they arrived on the website.
We also worked to ensure that the site speed was fully optimised on the new wesbite, as this had been an issue for SEO on the previous site. By nature, the website needed to be highly visual with lots of images, so we ensured that we used WebP and appropriate levels of image compression sitewide.
As with most modern websites, BT Office needed their new site to be designed mobile first. This can present a particular challenge with eCommerce sites, as there’s so much information that potentially needs to be provided for each product and variation.
However, by stripping the designs right back to what was essential, we were then able to create a clean design which worked on mobile, but which expanded on desktop to provide a more detailed experience without becoming cluttered or difficult to navigate.
BT Office’s products are incredibly varied, and have a vast number of customisations which can be added to each item including colour, size, material and functionality. This is great for their customers, but can also quickly become confusing and overwhelming, which could then lead to users going with another provider who made it easier for them to make their choices.
We knew that we needed to streamline these choices to ensure that variants were easy to select and enquire about, and we achieved this by restructuring the product pages to ensure that available options were clearly signposted, colour swatches were available for each product and range, and accordions utilised to keep the page feeling clutter-free whilst also containing all the information a customer could possibly need to make their choice.
Space planning is one of the USPs of BT Office, but on their old website they weren’t able to promote it in as effective way as they would have liked to due to limitations with the templates.
It’s vitally important in a crowded industry to capitalise on your differentiators, so we designed a highly visual, image-driven layout to provide information about the service and encourage potential customers to request a free quotation. Other office furniture retainers don’t have this kind of expertise in-house, so being able to offer it to even the smaller clients is a huge selling point for their business, so we needed to shout about it!
In the office furniture industry, case studies are one of the most effective ways of showing what you’re able to achieve for your clients. With this in mind, we created a template for case studies which highlights individual products used within the project, and links to the space planning service which can help the potential customer to visualise how their new office layout might look.
We needed these pages to be visually engaging, so we ensured that there was plenty of space for large, glossy images alongside the informative text, as well as a gallery lower down on the page to showcase the full breadth of the project.
We add new projects to our portfolio as we finish them, so check back regularly to see what we’ve been working on.