Driving Sales through New Website, Shop and Product Configurator

IST

Client IST AG
Year 2022
Role Discovery, MVP, software development
01 —

Summary

IST AG is one of the world's leading manufacturers of physical, chemical and biological sensors, headquartered in Ebnat-Kappel, Switzerland. As the products are considered complex and in many cases custom-made, the majority of sales are traditionally made through physical channels such as direct sales and trade fairs. Although the previous website already offered its own web store, it did not yet play a significant role strategically.

In addition to explaining complex products on the website, one challenge IST AG faced was that its sales department was overloaded by a high number of customer inquiries. General product inquiries and special requests previously required a great deal of communication.

In order to relieve the sales department in the future, B-works developed and launched a completely new website, including product finder and webshop, together with IST AG. This covers the entire customer journey from initial contact to recommendation and takes into account the requirements of the customers, as well as those of the IST departments, which must be able to map and efficiently implement the individual tasks along the value chain.

Project category: Website with webshop and product configurator

Title: IST Digital

Client: Innovative Sensor Technology IST AG, Switzerland

Industry: B2B, technology, production, sensors

Objectives: Develop a new company website for IST AG, including product finder and webshop. Development of components that allow content managers to easily and quickly create new pages via layout builder and customize them as desired via drag & drop. Simplified contact forms that allow website visitors to send quicker, easier and more targeted inquiries to the sales department, thus reducing the latter's workload in the long term. Designing the website as a mobile-first design. The project included the following activities:

  • Discovery workshop with twelve departments at IST to fully identify user needs and problems, create personas, and design customer journeys for specific use cases.
  • Design of the website and its components using mockups, which allowed the client to test the design and user experience and provide feedback before the actual implementation.
  • Implementation of the complete website, webshop and product configurator in iterative sprints.

B-works role: Discovery, UX/UI design, backend and frontend development

Technology: Drupal 9 (CMS), Drupal Layout Builder

Project scope: 12 months with 5 B-works team members

02 —

Our work

For this project, B-works put together a Scrum team consisting of a product owner, a UX/UI designer, a backend developer, a frontend developer and a test engineer.

The project was split into a discovery phase, a design phase, and an implementation phase and implemented using Scrum.

Process and tools:

The following factors were critical to the successful and timely implementation of the project:

  • Kick-off meeting to define project goals and functionality to be achieved.
  • Establishment of a synergistic team of 5, consisting of a product owner, UX/UI designer, and three developers
  • Discovery workshops to develop product vision, develop personas, define pain points and needs, create customer journeys
  • Design phase to develop low-fidelity and high-fidelity mockups of the website and its components
  • Bi-weekly sprints with sprint reviews, plannings and grooming sessions
  • Bi-weekly progress reports with client after sprint reviews
  • Website development with Drupal 9
  • Monthly time tracking and budget reporting with Jira & Harvest
  • Agile testing through B-works, ongoing acceptance by client and parallel bug fixing by development team

Technologies used:

  • Drupal 9
03 —

Key benefits for the client

Already in the first two months after go-live, IST AG has seen significant measurable improvements with the new website. They've seen a high increase in website visitors, longer average time spent on the website and a decrease in bounce rate.

Together with the UX/UI designer from B-works, the website was developed according to user experience best practices. It is now much easier for website visitors to find the right product category and the actual product thanks to the product finder. Additional filters allow searches to be refined and narrowed down. The product pages have also been designed in such a way that the most important information can be found quickly and easily. The entire checkout process has also been redesigned to maximize the completion rate.

If the product you are looking for is currently out of stock or requires a specific customer request, the new contact forms make it much easier than before to send these inquiries to IST AG. All it takes now is the push of a button in the store and the right product is already preselected. New forms have been specially developed for this purpose. This pleases the website visitors and the sales department.

With the help of the new website, IST AG's content managers now have maximum flexibility in designing new pages and adding content. The Drupal Layout Builder allows them to select, place and arrange components on a page thanks to a drag-and-drop interface. Every single component was designed and implemented according to the customer's wishes - both in the frontend and in the backend.

In order to achieve these results and to gather the most important needs of each department of IST AG, several on-site workshops were conducted. Representatives from the departments worked with B-works to develop and prioritize ideas based on customer problems and needs, which were then turned into prototypes and tested by B-works. IST AG was then able to select its "must-have" features for version 1.0 of the new website. This additional benefit validation of the individual components gave IST AG increased chances of success and cost certainty for the project. The effort for the implementation could then be safely estimated by B-works and finally the project was implemented on time and on budget. 

  • New website with new design and improved UX for IST AG
  • Product finder and webshop, making product search and purchase easier for website visitors
  • Drag-and-drop layout builder for easier page creation with predefined components for content managers
  • Mobile-first design, all pages are now responsive and suitable for any display size
  • New contact forms for faster and easier contact for website visitors
  • Development in 12 months, within budget and planned go-live date
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