Westminster Theological Seminary’s online bookstore, or WTSBooks, is an eCommerce site that specializes in religious literature on the Christian faith. While they had the same needs as any other online retailer, every audience is unique, and our first steps involved strategies to determine what the perception of the WTSBooks’ brand, browsing experience, purchase flow, and customer service was.
We spent our first week doing a web audit of the existing website and previous designs, conducting competitive reviews for three of WTSBooks top competitors, and collecting user feedback directly from their customers. These exercises resulted in this powerful Design Insight:
When products have testimonials by religious thought-leaders attached to them, conversions are higher because the audience has a high level of trust in their opinions.
With this Design Insight in hand, our perception of where we could add the most value shifted tremendously and gained significant focus. While we create a new design that improved the improved the navigation and browsing experience, we could look for key ways to surface and promote testimonials by religious thought-leaders wherever possible.
