Putting customer experience at the heart of website design

Challenge

Bosch Rexroth is a world-leading global supplier in assembly technology, offering its customers a vast array of hydraulics, electric drive and control technology.

Their website is their shop window – it provides details about products and services, serving as both a key resource and a support centre. Customers can get technical documentation and service information, local partners can access contact details and prospective employees can explore career opportunities. Underpinning all of this sits Bosch Rexroth’s key values and culture.

But as the site has grown over time – with countries managing their own sub-domains – the site had become disjointed. It lacked a common information architecture and engaging design for key pages, leading to an inconsistent user experience across country sites.

We were tasked with setting up a programme of incremental enhancements to the website, to improve engagement and make it easier for visitors to complete key actions.

Solution

Using the Careers section of the website as our starting point, we identified audience challenges and needs to create personas. These helped us reveal key areas of improvement in the website, for example, while the audience is evenly weighted between early careers and experienced professionals, the site was focusing on graduates and apprenticeships.

We planned an ideal customer journey for the different areas of the site, which gave us the basis for an initial information architecture. This helped us build a set of benchmarking criteria for each audience use case – so when we started reviewing other pages, we could score each page to gauge which elements were under-performing. At the same time, we were analysing competitor sites that targeted the same audiences, using our benchmarking criteria to identify elements that provided a better user experience. This meant we could target areas for improvement and ‘best practice’ principles for future developments.

To ensure the content worked as hard as possible, we used wireframes to agree the layout of the pages before beginning the designs. We used components from the Rexroth digital library to ensure a consistent look and feel with the existing site and created easy-to-follow guidelines for the individual country teams to follow when implementing the pages on their own sites.

With the design in place, we refreshed the existing copy and created new content for new page sections. Our earlier audience persona work enabled us to craft this content around audience needs – on the Careers page we balanced the content between experienced professionals and early careers. The on-page content was optimised for search-engines, so the pages were more easily ‘findable’ for prospective applicants. Finally, we carried out SERP ranking and keyword analysis to align the pages with SEO best practice.

Results

A refreshed and modernised website design that was more attractive to prospective applicants, easily navigable and could easily be updated by different teams – all while staying consistent to Bosch Rexroth’s brand.