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Challenge
Scientific device manufacturer Hamilton Company needed a new site design that presented their complex catalogue of products in a way that was both clear and comprehensive.
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Solution
A UX-focused engagement with special attention paid to the data model for organizing, categorizing, and displaying Hamilton’s product offerings.
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Results
A redesigned site leveraging Craft CMS + Craft Commerce to make Hamilton’s product portfolio easy to manage by staff and easy to shop for by customers, resulting in a 21% increase in purchase rate.
Threading the needle. Hamilton Company has a unique challenge in the ecommerce space: not only do they make a variety of robotics platforms, storage systems, sensors, and laboratory products, but they also offer a menu of specialized products — like syringes — that are customizable to a nearly infinite degree. Making this myriad of options findable and easy to purchase for customers might have seemed like a job for a custom-built content management system, but after conducting a technical discovery and functionality assessment, Viget determined that Craft CMS paired with Craft Commerce was a great fit.
Areas of Expertise
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A Model for Risk Mitigation
Working through discovery with Hamilton went beyond creating documents and spreadsheets. We built a prototype that allowed us to vet data modeling decisions in the CMS and translate that to an early version of the front-end product browsing experience. Iterative progress-sharing and collaboration with the Hamilton team allowed us to spot potential problems and edge-cases well before starting the full build, thereby mitigating the risk of getting far into design and development before identifying that an approach wouldn’t work.
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Migrating Complex Data
Hamilton’s legacy CMS was difficult to use and had a complicated data model that was different than the data model for the new site. Using the newly structured and reorganized data, we developed a custom plugin to accommodate the data model differences and automate product data migration to the new CMS. In addition to an unintuitive CMS, the previous site experience for front-end site visitors was suboptimal and slow. To load thousands of products on the new site without hindering performance, we leveraged Algolia, a powerful search tool that served as the foundation for our multifaceted search and filtering system. Getting creative with off-the-shelf solutions let us deliver enterprise-quality software without any of the enterprise-style clunkiness.
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"The development work was smart and well planned, and from a technology perspective, Craft was the perfect fit to unite our CMS and E-commerce systems. Viget’s industry vanguard, superb implementation team, and decades of web development experience have resulted in an excellent website experience for both Hamilton’s marketing teams and customers alike."
Summary
We focused on the intersection between user experience and data management to turn an off-the-shelf CMS into a solution that feels customized — letting Hamilton Company clearly showcase their complex breadth of products to customers.
