Summary

• Relaunched the eCommerce platform of the UK's largest independent record label, taking over £1m annual revenue.
• Improved conversion rate by 116%, from 0.8% to 3%.
• Delivered against a key objective of aiding the storytelling around Domino's artists, driving engagement with artist content and releases, resulting in 55% increase in sessions, 90% increase in page views, and 2x increase in back catalogue sales.

Responsibilities: Gathered business requirements from senior stakeholders, reviewed site analytics to identify opportunities, re-architectured site structure and customer journey, ran RFP for design and development agencies and managed delivery to launch.

‍Contributors: Another Kind (UI design & development), Type A (SEO)

URL: www.dominomusic.com

Problem

Domino's site was originally developed in the early 2000s and hadn't had much love since. Due to fragmentation of the site into various territory-specific sub-domains and imprints, the site was in need of a complete re-structure into a coherent information architecture. It was not optimised for mobile making browsing on touch devices difficult while driving down search ranking.

The site served as the main e-commerce platform for the business, providing a steady revenue stream from artist and label fans but had no modern e-commerce features, with clear opportunities to increase conversion rate by improving the shopping experience.

For all its flaws, the site was loved internally for its 'time-capsule' feel, so the redevelopment had to be handled sensitively, ensuring the key stakeholders were fully on-board with UX and visual design decisions at each step.

Discovery & definition

To fully immerse myself in the business and its challenges, I proposed an initial month-long discovery phase based in the client's office to give me direct access to the team and see the operation first-hand.

During that period I interviewed all the key stakeholders, from the founder down to the intern responsible for updating content on the site, to qualitatively understand their needs and pain points.

Alongside this, I took a deep dive into the site architecture, mapping the current structure and identifying areas for improvement, while pouring over the site analytics to understand user behaviour quantitively. A session recorder, HotJar, was installed on the site to give first-hand observations of customer interactions while we surveyed existing customers to understand their frustrations with the current service.

A key finding from the research found that experimental artist specific stores that had driven sales and conversions strongly as customers felt they were buying directly from the artist. This was a clear business opportunity to increase direct-to-fan sales across their whole catalogue.

The outputs from this discovery phase were distilled down into a list of key recommendations, project plan and budgets that were presented to the board for sign-off.

Key recommendations

• Redesign Domino Records to become the main hub for everything Domino related
• Migrate Domino Records site to dominomusic.com domain
• Territory specific sites should be incorporated into main .com domain
• Domino Mart to support artist and imprint stores and extended to support the full Domino catalogue.
• New CMS should be extended to run Domino Records. Old CMS should be depreciated to allow warehouse staff to manage one system.
• Content to be migrated from the old site and formatted for the new system.
• Imprints to keep their own sites, linked to from the new Domino site. The new Domino site should have space to promote imprint artists / releases.

Wireframing

Once the scope of the project was defined and stakeholders were bought into the approach, I set about wireframing the site to form the basis of a brief to put out to development agencies. This detailed all proposed functionality and created a clickable prototype for user testing and stakeholder consultation.

View Desktop clickable prototype

Design & Deliver

With the project fully scoped, wireframed and validated, I ran an RFP to select a UI design and development agency, settling on Another Kind to bring the site to life while the internal development team handled the back-end and content migration.

Working in tandem with Domino's in-house art director, Matt Cooper, we developed a new bold visual direction for the site to fit Domino's idiosyncratic brand.

Results

The business has seen a good boost in both revenue and traffic since the relaunch of the site, hitting objectives to improve e-commerce customer journeys, improve conversion rate, and drive higher volumes of traffic:

• 4x improvement in conversion rate
• Back catalogue sales now represent 30% of revenue - 2x increase.
• 90% increase in page views - supporting the objective to aid the storytelling of Domino's artists
• 91% of customers rated the site as 'easy to use' with 95% planning to purchase again from the site in the future.