Meet the Client
Corinthian Marine has been designing and manufacturing marine-grade carpeting, boat flooring, and boat mats for more than thirty years. A division of Corinthian Textiles, Corinthian Marine has offices around the country and sells nationwide, both directly to consumers and through its network of dealers. While business is steady, growth has flattened year-over-year and Corinthian contacted us to provide a boost to their digital presence.
The Problem
There’s no other way to put it: Corinthian’s website was dated—both technologically and aesthetically. As a result, online sales numbers were extremely low and if customers didn’t abandon the website to check out a competitor’s offerings they picked up the phone and angrily called Corinthian to ask questions, place an order, or just complain about the website.
How we approach e-commerce projects
Before we get into our role throughout this relationship, we’d like to give you a quick overview of how we think around here. The fact is, for clients like Corinthian there is no guideline or predetermined template that solves their team’s issues. To drive sales and improve user engagement (in the most cost-effective way possible) we redesigned and streamlined buying experience from the ground up. We start with primary goals and work our way from there:
Client Goals:
- Completely redefine and simplify the buying process
- Instantly establish credibility with users
Completely Redefine and Simplify the Buying Process
Armed with our preliminary research and a sales process that already (gently) defined exactly what is costing Corinthian online sales and frustrating potential customers and dealers—our team got to work. We began drafting sitemaps and running our personas through user flows while building simple page prototypes. The prototypes, while not necessary on every e-commerce build, can really help the client wrap their head around our vision that we may just have on sketchbooks and whiteboards. Not only that, early prototypes allow us to get a head start on wireframes and content needs for the client going forward.
A few sample user flows
Our Thoughts
“With product offerings and variables that necessitated discrete buying processes, it was a challenge to design a solution that would guide users through each process while still encouraging exploration of the site. I always enjoy a project that gets formulated within our 'Whiteboard Room,' and to make sure ideas were both comprehensive and intuitive we had team members playing devil's advocate of each user path sketch. The final solution was materialized from iterative collaboration and creativity, elements that reinforce my appreciation for my Gravitate team! ”
“When they came to us their shopping experience was a mess. Taking on the challenge of streamlining their complex checkout process was the highlight of this project for me. Our team came up with a great solution that holds the user's hand through their experience. ”
“It's exciting when we can deliver a site that is clearly the new benchmark for their industry. It's also great when we can alleviate real day-to-day frustrations for our client's team and their customers. Corinthian was a project where we got to do both. ”