The DWR Content Hub
Tools Used: Figma, Miro
Client: Design Within Reach
Research Methods: Stakeholder Interviews, Benchmarking
Role: UX Strategist/Product Designer
Problem to solve
Design Within Reach is a leader in the design and furniture sales space; the companies mission is to inspire and solve problems through design.
The first part of the mission reads:
"When you need answers, advice, or just a little bit of inspiration, we're always here to help..."
As a company, we had services set up like free design consultations to help us live into our mission. We also had a blog. However, it wasn't up to date and didn't deliver content relevant to what was happening in the industry or our customer's lives. The blog link was living within an accordion in the footer. A few large bucket categories within the blog are Architecture, Design, People, and Culture. The current blog is on a sub-domain, which means Google doesn't recognize the content, and that limits traffic to the blog site.
DWR needed a findable place to house content relevant to our users and ties back to our mission to answer questions, give advice, or just a little bit of inspiration.
Background & Context
When starting on the project team for this work, I wanted to start by gathering as much context as possible for this new and improved Content Hub. When I started asking questions about the current state blog, our plans for building the new Content Hub, and our roadmap for this work, I realized that we needed a strategy for designing this new site we would create from the ground up.
Designing our strategy
I took it upon myself to draft up a strategy document that broke down what we were building and why and the scope of the Content Hub MVP, and what design would focus on for the duration of our involvement.
I then scheduled time with our core working team to review the strategy document and take feedback before presenting it to DWR leadership and our stakeholders. From there, we were off to the races.
Scope of my work
I was a Product Designer coming in early to work with project set-up, stakeholder management, and early phase design discovery and concepting. I would be handing off the concepts to the DWR Product Designers to run with from there.
I mapped specific purposes for the pages I planned to create concepts for, so we only focused on what we needed for MVP.
4. Specific content/Article focused page
Goal: Interesting, readable layout for the type of content on display
5. Content highlight(s) on other pages throughout the site
Goal: Surface content and/or links to content throughout the site when it's relevant to the specific page
Pages could include: Product Detail Pages & Product Listing Pages
The Content Hub landing page
Goal: Highlight new and/or relevant content to a season, style, sale, etc.
The Content Hub navigation
Goal: Provide a way for users to move within the hub and filter by category or subcategory
Category/sub-category landing page
Goal: Highlight content in a filtered view depending on the user's choice.
This plan kept the design exploration phase focused, so I could concentrate on going broad where it was needed and kept the team and me from going down rabbit holes. We had a strategy brief to go back to and share to support the scope staying small to start.
Design exploration
I started the concepting phase by working closely with DWR's Data and Analytics team to understand what categories and subcategories made sense. They provided me a list of categories we could use that would be highly findable for search engines and relevant to searches our users were performing.
At the same time, I looked around at some of our competitors to see how they handled blogs and content hubs, noting patterns, styles, and layouts. I logged the examples on a Miro board. It became a visual competitive analysis and mood board of styles that were inspiring.
Once I had the SEO list of categories from Data and Analytics, I started on some quick, iterative wireframes for the various pages we needed. My focus was on layout and usability over visual design. I think about wireframes as the blueprints of visual design; I need to know what the foundation of the page will be before you start designing.
Early Exploration through Wireframing
After completing some wireframes, I reviewed the ideas with our Lead UI Designer for feedback and narrowed in on some layout concepts I could move forward into a mid-fidelity phase.
I wanted to make the Content Hub feel like DWR by using the style guide but push the layout slightly to make it feel different enough from a retail site. I focused on typestyles and played with sizing to push the scale. I used UI patterns in new ways to make the Content Hub more explorable and inspiring. I wanted to break molds where I could while keeping sortable and findable as a main priority for the hub.
Mid-Fidelity Concepts
Handing the work over
Once I felt like I had a good set of options for the DWR Product Design team to run with, I handed the project off. The Product Design team is currently working on the final designs now, but I'm excited to see the final product take shape, knowing I was vital to paving the UX strategy and Visual Strategy for the new site.