They had seen that evolving the Tredz online presence to feel more specialist and premium would be key in transforming these one-off customers into returning visitors. They also wanted to reduce their reliance on PPC and build an organic SEO presence for their products.

Like so many websites and content management systems that have grown organically, their tech stack didn’t support dynamic, reactive content-led campaigns. On top of this, the internal cost of catalogue management and content production meant the team struggled to build content structures that supported SEO and experience-led journeys.

With a new experience-focused rebrand, the Tredz team took the opportunity to radically rethink their online e-commerce tools to meet the new challenges of the post-pandemic economy.

Tredz engaged Nomensa to take the website through an end-to-end digital transformation to:

• increase conversions

• increase total order value

• improve the buying experience for specific groups of users

Other KPIs included reducing call centre traffic for help and support queries and reducing returns and incorrectly sized products.

Understanding Tredz

To understand the complex challenges the Tredz team faced, we started with stakeholder interviews across the business. We followed these up with collaborative workshops to examine the value proposition and hear the team’s aspirations and concerns for the transformation work.

Themes we uncovered included:

• a perceived lack of flexibility for the marketing team about the tools and levers for promotions

• frustration with web and content systems that were highly manual and relied on individuals producing one-off pages and designs to respond to evolving business needs

To guarantee all stakeholders got the most out of a transformation project we needed to create a system that responded to immediate needs and allowed no-code updates to journeys and page layouts. This system also had to allow for a strong brand and change control governance.

Understanding users

With an understanding of Tredz as an organisation, we moved on to getting a deep understanding of the users of Tredz. We explored their motivations, habits and behaviours through in-depth user interviews and moderated usability sessions on the existing web experience.

Tredz were keen to understand their users and break the perception of cycling experts as being a single type of person. The aim was to open up the cycling world to underrepresented cyclists from various backgrounds and contexts early on in the process.

To achieve this we focused on diversity in the research recruitment process. This helped us create detailed personas that informed behaviour across a broad spectrum of human experiences.

This focus on diversity was a lens the team applied to all major design decisions throughout the project.

The team then set to work on collaboratively designing a modern, content-led experience that leveraged Tredz’s expertise and showcased the quality of their products in line with user needs.

Dynamic content

Tredz wanted to make a site that was a destination for expertise, product reviews and high-quality cycling content alongside excellent, cost-effective products. Balancing the needs of the business to get products in front of potential customers while showcasing high-quality content requires a systematic approach to page and template structure.

Through high-energy co-design sessions with the Tredz team, we prototyped a system of dynamic content blocks that could be dialled up or down depending on how transactionally focused the page was. This approach was even more important in the challenging cycling market post-COVID as the Tredz marketing team must react to flux and use multiple promotional levers to run successful campaigns.

This meant that early, browsing-focused pages could allow users to explore a range of guides, reviews and inspirational content that was bespoke to their particular interest in cycling. Additionally, more specific product-related pages could have a slim slice of practical content such as “how to fit a pannier rack” or “size guide for tyres” which was targeted at serious, high-knowledge shoppers.

This dynamic content could be pulled through onto various journeys in keeping with the user’s stage in their decision-making process. The content also had a permanent home in the new IA to provide a solid SEO footprint for the topics that help Tredz perform as a high-quality, expert-led cycling destination.

An atomic design system

For a complex e-commerce site with dynamic content-led journeys, it’s integral to the success and long-term maintenance of the site that design is delivered in a systematic and well-governed way.

The team built out the design in an atomic system of elements, atoms, molecules and organisms. This gave the future team a strong set of tools to make near endlessly customisable layouts and journeys while maintaining trust and brand through strong governance and usage guides.

With tight timeframes and a busy development team, we were happy to also support Tredz in building out these front-end components in a way that the team could take away and use themselves.

We did this by handing over the design components to our team of front-end and accessibility experts who built out vue.js components into Storybook, a cloud-based code repository that both the Nomensa and Tredz teams could use to build out templates tested, AA accessible experiences.

Launch and impact

As parts of the site come online we are starting to see tangible results of the great work we have done and the Tredz team have continued with.

By releasing a small slice and testing which included the re-designed basket and checkout journeys we were able to see an immediate 4.5% conversion uplift. This is equivalent to an additional 1,500 orders a month which we were all delighted to see.