Improved navigation and a new slick UI

They had acquired 2 other water technology brands, with more acquisitions on the horizon. AquaPhoenix tasked us to design a unified website that effectively communicates the expanded product and service offerings of the combined entity.

The existing AquaPhoenix website suffered from a confusing site architecture with inconsistent categorisation and a lack of page templates. Additionally, it had a dated visual identity from decades ago that no longer resonated with audiences of today. The website lacked clear call-to-actions and had limited product discoverability, hindering users self-serving to find resources or make a purchase.

The 2 other brands shared the same problems and brought with them 400 pages of content.

I co-led a client workshop to better understand their goals, their audience, and the competitive landscape. We audited the 3 merging websites and defined that all 531 pages could be categorised into 1 of 18 page template types. Next, I helped assign every page to a new template.

I researched the information architecture of their top competitors and created a new site map and simplified navigation in collaboration with my team and the client. We created wireframes for each page template, while in the background designing and presenting multiple UI concepts. Once the client was happy with a new look and feel, the wireframes were translated into high-fidelity.

With a massive site like this, the key was to keep the designs and navigation as simple as possible. The existing navigation was problematic in multiple ways:

Key changes implemented:

The UI hadn't been updated since 1990. We collected the client's likes and dislikes of their competitors' visual styles and created moodboards mixing in inspiration from outside the industry. We went through several rounds of presenting UI concepts and iterating based on the feedback.

With an abundance of content on the website and given the product images were less than ideal, my goal was to nail a look that was more minimal, modern, and professional.

The client's feedback was that they really wanted to encourage users to make purchases without needing to contact their team. The designs were tweaked to put a new search function front and centre on the hero to funnel customers into the eStore.

Additionally, new signpost blocks for industry-specific pages and for popular product recommendations were incorporated on the Home page and used throughout the site to increase discoverability and self-serve capabilities. Finally, a new sort and filter system was added to the Resources page to reduce the cognitive load when navigating through hundreds of pieces of content.

It now has an increased pages per visit count (now 2.15) and higher visit duration (up 12 seconds). The client would not disclose the exact data from prior to the engagement for me to calculate the percentage increases.

This project was a learning lesson in the importance of brand guidelines, design systems, and close collaboration with development teams. A handover resource was prepared but some changes and flows were changed in ways that go against best practice after the fixed term deal.

In the future, I would fight to have more face time with the teams actually building our designs to do a more in-depth handover.