anova website redesign
As Anova was growing its product line to include more offerings and expanding outside of its original signature product, they were still operating their direct sale business through an outdated website with navigation and content that didn’t speak to the new product variety or their now expansive resources for current and future customers. With the launch of the new oven fast approaching, Anova needed a navigable site that could scale with products and content, with clear and simple UX, and would bring traffic toward oven sales.
execution
Anova was accustomed to using its home page, navigation, and other content to promote their Precision Cookers, which made efforts to squeeze in mentions of anything else seem out of place or even off-brand. As Creative Director and also an individual design contributor in early 2020, I approached the effort to make these big changes by breaking the construction into phases.
The first phase was to drive traffic to the MVP (minimum viable product) oven landing page with quickly iterated placeholder design solutions on the home and products pages, and establish an updated sitemap. I collaborated with upper management and web developers to align on strategy for the sitemap, addressing potential problems with renaming existing URLs, effects on SEO, and effects on links from existing ad campaigns. We then set up a plan for which pieces to implement first so that we were taking an incremental approach, and could periodically test the UX or check traffic metrics to ensure nothing was creating negative impacts on the site.
The second phase was to redesign the home page. The previous content of the page, devoted solely to the Precision Cooker products, would be moved to a new Precision Cooker page. The home page would become a high-level overview of the entire site’s information sectors, acting as a hub with easily navigable routes diving deeper into key content. The main menu navigation bar would echo this strategy, with even more minimalism, offering users the opportunity to immediately get into the most visited or highest interest pages of the site and eliminating potential areas of conflict once new content for the oven was available. I also added a shopping cart to the main menu which previously had only appeared once users were already in a transaction flow.
Visual formatting updates to nav bar elements brought the bar up to speed with other improvements across the site. New sections on the home page included featured blog and recipe cards regularly updated by the marketing team, a heroic intro to the signature product collection, a recipe-centric promotion of the connected app, cross-promotion of accessories, a directory for the multiple ways users could join the “community”, a more approachable email signup, and a link to the new social impact arm of Anova.
As incremental changes were implemented, we saw increased traffic flow first to the MVP oven page, and later to the full landing page, and traffic began to move more seamlessly from the home page into high-interest content. The third phase was designing the oven landing page and iterating based on user feedback and a collaborative team approach. I address the oven launch in more detail in a case study within this portfolio.
