BES Supplies

Overview

BES Supplies sells plumbing, heating and gas equipment to tradespeople and to consumers doing the work themselves, from a catalogue of more than 15,000 products. Its site had grown with the catalogue and the information architecture had not kept up: products were hard to find, the taxonomy did not match how a plumber thinks, and the two audiences were served the same journey. I led the research and redesign of the web and mobile platforms at Ampersand.

Research

Stakeholder interviews to understand the business, user research with both audiences, and workshops that produced personas and journeys for the trade customer ordering on a Tuesday morning for a job that afternoon and the consumer fitting a bathroom over a weekend. Data analysis of search terms and navigation paths showed where the catalogue's structure was losing people. The trade customer's first ask was filters that match how they buy: by size, brand, pack and whether it is in stock for tomorrow.

The design

A restructured information architecture and taxonomy built from the research rather than from the product database. Category listings with the filters the trade asked for and quantities that default to the trade pack. Product pages with the specification in full, related products, and a question route to BES's own experts. A basket designed for how the trade buys: add by part number, save the basket as a shopping list for the next job, choose next-day delivery to site or collection today, and pay by card or on account. The consumer journey shares the same pages with the trade options quietly out of the way. Low, medium and high fidelity wireframes were tested on web and mobile, then interactive prototypes, with WCAG 2.0 AA compliance across the deliverables.

Delivery

A team of ten with four direct reports over a year, on a Magento platform. I owned the plan, scope and change control, the RAID log and status reporting to the client sponsor, and the functional requirements were written so developers could estimate honestly, with UAT and QA gates before each release.

Results

Testing and feedback sessions confirmed the improvement in task completion and satisfaction across both audiences, and the persona-led design let BES speak to tradespeople and consumers without splitting the site in two. The homepage and product page wireframes here are from the delivered work; the category listing and basket are reconstructions drawn for the portfolio from the same design.