Samsung – Brilliant Basics

Samsung UK

Head of Marketing Domestic: Ruth Storey
Brand and Communication Consultant: Marine Lacoudree
Marketing Manager: Alexander Balcombe

Cheil

Project Manager: Lloyd Greenall
Account Manager: Amy Lee
Head of UX: James Sinclair
Lead UX: Aaron Standen
Junior UX: Daniel Mutis

Publicis Media

Owned Strategy Director: Louise Vanweezel
Senior SEO Analyst: Robert Mitow

My Role

Developed strategy and project roadmap.
Managed UX team, performed UX activities, and oversaw testing.

Background

Samsung provides world-class domestic appliances, but online sales through their website it was the worst-performing category by a margin. The UK domestic appliances (DA) marketing team wanted to improve the discovery, description, and understanding of products to increase customer engagement and ultimately boost the number of “Where to Buy” clicks. Initial work had been done, including two sitemaps, one by Samsung and one from Starcom, and identifying a personal assistant on the North American Site that the UK team wanted to adopt.

Challenge

Increase customer engagement and “Where to Buy” clicks.
Find a solution that works within the constraints of a fully templated site.
Ensure the new lab is up and running to facilitate the work.

Approach

This project marked a change in direction for Cheil as user testing would help progress the design for the first time. The first step was to develop a strategy to deliver improvements. The strategy was achieved by benchmarking the current performance and user journeys through analytics, reconciling two sitemaps, and performing in-house user testing on the US virtual assistant.

This informed how the DA content was performing and the impact of the sitemap and content changes on existing templates. A way forward was proposed, which involved handling sitemap and content changes using existing components but not binding the solution to a specific template, in order to reduce the time needed to get the changes live. The decision was made to build the US virtual assistant from scratch.

The UX team booked 15 users from the target audience, and the client was invited to attend the sessions. Testing was split into three rounds, allowing for the design to be iterated throughout, which rapidly progressed the design and took the client on the journey.

User testing was performed with the client attending, resulting in designs that changed markedly from where they had started in terms of both appearance and performance. Critically, the client understood the rationale behind the changes and accepted nearly all that was proposed.

Outcome

Improved customer engagement and increased “Where to Buy” clicks.
The work was promoted within Samsung UK by the DA team, resulting in Samsung UK approaching HQ to do a similar job for TV and getting the funding.
Cheil got a new way of working.
Published pages had a marked 11% increase in click-through and a moderate uplift in “Where to Buy.”
The category landing page demonstrated better full-page engagement.