NLA Bookshop Website Redevelopment
The National Library of Australia Bookshop is the nation’s specialist Australian bookshop located in Canberra. The NLA Bookshop has been an Erudite client for many years and recently came to us looking for a spruce up of their website and bring their site in line with best practices.
Issues
- The site needed to retain all existing information and tracking data
- Potential issues in merging three sets of data with increasing product catalogue size
- Potential issues in related lists with NLA Bookshop’s custom interface
- Potential issues retaining checkout order interface with NLA Bookshop's POS
Objectives
- Create a modern mobile responsive website with user experience as a priority
- Streamline the checkout process
- Retain and improve on existing SEO & web tracking analytics
- Decrease site load time as much as possible
- Provide targeted related product lists to encourage further browsing
Research
We had extensive consultations with NLA Bookshop where we investigated areas of the site that could be improved. We determined that the major pain points that we would address were the multi-step checkout, non-mobile responsive design and site load times. We conducted a complete UX/design process with wireframing and mockups to create a custom design that met these requirements. We determined that using the existing codebase and technologies of J2EE, HTML, CSS and custom Javascript would allow us to take a modular approach and only rewrite the parts that needed it. We also developed a custom hierarchy to dynamically create the related product lists from the interface with NLA Bookshop’s product management system. We conducted comprehensive tests on both the server and client site to improve the site load time.
Conclusions
The updated NLA Bookshop site is a much more streamlined site offering an improved user experience. The decreased site load time has a very noticeable effect on the user but also assists with SEO. The mobile responsive site also allows for more conversions as the browsing experience is much easier and more accessible.
