Background

GAK is the UK’s leading retailer of musical instruments, based in The North Laines in Brighton and doing half of its business online. Most of its customers are individual musicians, though GAK also supplies the education sector.

Problem

Minimum budget to achieve the maximum benefit. The main goal was to make an attractive website before the Christmas period shopping period started. There were many restriction, because we haven't have time to apply fundamental changes. We couldn't touch the basic information architecture, layout system. We had to find the balance between the new look and feel, business needs and technology.

Understand the Needs

We have ran hour's of interviews with the stakeholders regarding they vision and understand their needs. We have meeting with the development team also to understand the technical limitation our impact into the platform.

Research and SWOT analysis

Because of small budget we have decided to run research between the competitors websites to define the strength and weekness of the current website. We have agreed with the stakeholders that further research needed with the end users in the near future.

The plan

Based on our research we have decided that we will emphasize a lighter and moderner apperance of the layout. Beside the look and feel changes we try to prepare limited alterations where it was possible.

• - Couldn't make fundemental changes regarding the layout
• - The platform used Bootsrap 3 classes
• - Time limit

The New Look & Feel Idea

The goal was to add a modern, light and breezy apparance to the website. We wanted to drop the billboard style and preapare a consitent apparance.

Branding

We had to use existing brand elements, colours, etc. To start align elements to each others, keeping distance everywhere, using our new component library helped us to make fundemental changes in the look & feel.

UX/UI Improvments

We tried to take advantage of the situation and beside the new UI we started thinking how it is possible to increase the user experiences.

Introduced New Megamenu

The one of the most significant change was the introduction of the new megamenu. It was spaceful, aligned well and had a capatibility to show additional advertisment on the webpage. This change helped the users to easly identify the categories and goods. Also increased the CTA rate to drive users to specific item's page.

New Icon Library

We have created and started used the same library. The permanent usage of the icons from the same library gives confidence to the user.

Consistent and transparent layout

We have focus to redefine the categories and their styles. We wanted to make them consistent and avoid protruding pieces.

Redesigned, modern UI components

Because of using Bootsrap 3 we had a limitation to move functions or components of the website. We tried to use Bootsrap to support the alignments of the webpage elements. Also we redesigned some Bootsrap components to give the website a more modern look and feel.

Grid and List View

Although several webpages managed to used the list view / grid view on their webpages, GAK page doesn't have this function. If the user selected any categories the items appered in list view. With the introduction of this feature the users could compare faster items and itheir prices or just able to sufr between the pages.

Monitoring the Steps

Another improvment was the introduction of the progress bar. The content changed in the same window without reloading and if the user want to make any changes in the previous step he was not able to go back. The step indicator not just helped to the user see how far is he in the process, it gave an opportunity to step back as well.

Delivery Our Work

At the end we prepared a design documentation to our developers. We have helped to development team to implement our design and incorporrate new functions. We recently tested the implementation during the sprints to achieve the best result.

Epilogue

After few months of the succsecfull lunch there were more change on the website. Nowadays the website looks different GAK has changed his cororate identity.