Brentwood Home
Build a responsive website for a direct-to-consumer mattress company.
Build a responsive website for a direct-to-consumer mattress company.
Full website redesign for Brentwood Home, an e-commerce company manufacturing mattresses and bedroom essentials made from natural materials.
Project timeline: 6 months
I lead the entire redesign process, from research, to testing and development, leading to a successful launch on the Shopify platform.
Lead UX Designer (myself)
Graphic Designer
Photographer
Copywriter
underwhelming product pages, usability problems and confusing messageIn a crowded market with stiff competition, the brand faced low customer engagement, declining sales, and high returns. Product pages lacked vital details, leaving users struggling to discern the unique benefits and distinctions between the products. The website failed to convey the brand values; during user testing, a user even thought we sold wood cabins.
Some of the problems were:
Brentwood Home will not survive another year if we don't address these issues quickly.
User-Centered design for the winI launched a brand new online experience that not only increased our business revenue but also transformed our customers' shopping experience into something enjoyable and memorable. By effectively addressing our users' queries, we significantly reduced our return rates, as customers were now making more informed and confident purchasing decisions.
What I did:
Conversion
Rate
+183%
Home Page
Bounce Rate
-28%
Blog Articles
Engagement
+83%
Product
Return Rate
-9%
When I joined the small team at Brentwood Home, with 8 office staff and around 100 factory workers, they had just launched a basic website to mark their online presence amid significant competition. From interviewing the CEO, I learned of its origins as a white-label mattress manufacturer founded by his father, and now, the shift to a new brand identity and products aimed at a younger market. The primary brand objective was to use sustainable and natural materials for its products with a California ethos.
Our mission is to create products for a younger audience using sustainable, natural materials, while ensuring and demonstrating transparency in all our processes.
The next step was to run usability tests on our website to understand where we stood. I used usertesting.com and recruited 30 participants matching our target audience.
What we discovered was interesting and unexpected:
I collaborated with the customer service team to understand the challenges they encounter daily. Additionally, I requested access to their chat transcripts to analyze common customer inquiries.
What I learned:
To go even further in my research and understand customer priorities, I initiated a post-checkout survey and also set up a questionnaire on product pages to gather insights from users who hadn't made a purchase yet.
The warranty & return policies are the most important deciding factor when making a purchase, closely followed by product descriptions.
Home page:
Collection page:
Product pages:
I synthetized all the research and presented it to the stakeholders. I also made a strong case for hiring a professional photographer and copywriter to truly bring our brand up to the standard of our competitors. This proposal was met with agreement, recognizing the value it added in light of the research findings.
Leveraging insights from my research, I made a customer journey and empathy map, which I then displayed in a common area for all our teams and stakeholders to view. This strategic placement served a key purpose: it's a visual tool that invites everyone, beyond just the UX team, to momentarily reflect on the realities and experiences of our customers when they interact with our products.
User experience is not just about the digital experience. We need to look at the experience as a whole, starting from when the user first considers the product, to the moment they receive it and start interacting with it.
Once again, I intentionally used the office's common area to showcase my research and the wireframes we were working on, making the entire process a collaborative effort. We would meet around the different boards with anyone who was interested in learning more about the process and UX. That's when I started to notice the growing UX maturity within the company.
To address the highly requested feature of a comparison page, I built a prototype and conducted user testing. The feedback gathered was instrumental in refining the design, leading to a final version that was visually appealing and provided just enough information to help customers without overwhelming them — a crucial consideration given the complexity of choosing mattresses.
I continued my design journey, testing and refining each page. Dozens of wireframes and prototypes later, we were finally ready to build and launch the new experience!
The photographer's work brilliantly captured our story, resonating deeply with our customers through compelling lifestyle imagery.
The copywriter effectively distilled the advantages of our products into simple, clear language and crafted content for our material and certification pages, enhancing customer appreciation for our transparency.
Our graphic designer skillfully created icons and a cohesive style guide that reflect the company's core values.
After the successful launch, I closely monitored the site's analytics and continued making improvements using a/b testings and data gathered from Hotjar such as heatmaps and user recordings.
Conversion
Rate
+183%
Home Page
Bounce Rate
-28%
Product Page
Engagement
+65%
Customer Service
Chat Requests
-8%
The six-month journey was a profound learning experience and the collaboration with my colleagues was incredibly rewarding. I take great pride in introducing user-centric design to a company where it was previously absent, and the positive impact on our business KPIs post-redesign was truly inspiring. We began as a company facing tough challenges and stiff competition, but by employing the right UX methods, we transformed into something remarkable.
