With a newly-designed brand identity created in 2024 by myself, Distant Lands required a design refresh of their trade portal website to restyle with the new brand, and to improve the site’s user experience. The key UX pain points were the site’s navigation, the order process, and the overall design and hierarchy.
The trade portal is the most important tool the company has in terms of sales, customer engagement and a hub of information, so it was vital to elevate its design and create a smoother user journey.
In collaboration with Jake Hodges.
Ideation:
After a briefing with the Distant Lands team, Jake and I workshopped functionality ideas and identified key problems we could solve to get the site working better. These were:
- Unclear website architecture
- Order request issues, customers failing to click the right button
- Lack of clarity with site navigation
- Homepage that could work harder
Our complementary skills in design and development, plus our prior knowledge of the company’s unique ways of working, meant that we arrived at solutions that the client loved and hit the mark with problem solving.
Execution:
The first step was to draw up a new site map, and develop a site hierarchy that ensured a natural flow to the customer journey. The company had evolved since the creation of the site, and the focus of its product offering had shifted to Beer, Wine and Mead, so we needed to ensure these were given equal weighting, whilst also highlighting the Pre-Orders section.
Distant Lands work in a unique way - they are a small team who handle all orders personally and they value their customer relationships. When a customer orders products on the site, it is not an instant purchase, but an order request which gets delivered to the team, and responded to by email. As this is an unconventional system, it is even more important that the user knows what is happening at each stage.
We devised a new order request process for the site, simplifying it down to as few steps as possible, with clear signposting, terminology and CTAs to guide the user.
The site navigation was a crucial part of the project. There was a lack of clarity on areas of the trade portal and where information lived, and it was challenging for users to move to different areas of the site.
The introduction of the top nav bar is a key improvement, defining the areas of the site and being visible at all times. The colour highlight also indicates which page the user is on currently.
The restyle of the filter helps with legibility issues and groups different types of filter information for ease of filtering. The design is translated across to the wine filter with the same style but different fields, helping with consistency.
The homepage is the biggest change aesthetically as well as functionally, as it provides a hub for key information whilst simplifying the way it is accessed. The page provides a space for product imagery and to showcase producers and event information. There is also opportunity to build on the content as it has a modular design.
Impact:
The UX and design improvements have eased the user journey and allowed customers to find and order the products they are looking for more swiftly. This is particularly important for a business whose sales come exclusively through one website.
The functionality of the site is unique to the business and its newly designed form has been an asset to the team in providing a professional selling platform that works for their customers.