Designing B2B Websites: Monsoon’s Most Innovative Cases
At Monsoon we believe that business-to-business and business-to-consumer projects are both equally interesting to work on, and each present their own unique sets of challenges. While B2C can get more of the spotlight, our team enjoys working on innovative B2B projects just as much (if not more) to unite form and function through digital transformation.
We were honoured to create websites for large and well-known Irish and UK brands. Let’s explore some of them.
Food & Beverage: Branding and Accessibility
A major Irish B2B food and beverage distributor wanted to have two websites with similar structure, but unique UI design. The goal was to lead two types of users (bakery workers and restaurant workers) to the landing page where they were able to select what website they needed to interact with – World of Bakery or World of Ingredients.
When creating a website design for well established brands, we always want to be consistent with existing visual design guidelines. We strive to maintain a consistent look and feel for customers both online and offline. However, we always make sure that visual guidelines won’t stand in the way of website accessibility and general usability.
We noticed that one of the main brand colours wasn’t passing our accessibility test. We had to find a colour-compromise that would not be very different from brand book and yet would create necessary contrast ratio.
The majority of people have one or another kind of vision impairment, and even the slightest ones can get in the way of proper interaction with the web. Our design team always prioritises accessibility when working on colour and font libraries. Not only we are making sure that all elements will be visible and noticeable on all screens with all lightning conditions, but we also are creating designs that will allow users with colour blindness to have seamless interactions (for example: having error messages highlighted in red is not enough, it should have an appropriate icon and guide user with their next steps where possible).
Fonts and colours are very key elements in a company’s brand. That being said, unless you’re a designer or have a very keen eye, you’re likely not going to notice minor differences between two closely related fonts.
We realised that our client can save their budget by using a visually similar, but free, font for their website.
Both suggestions were happily accepted and we ended up with high quality results.
Retail/Electronics: User Interface Improvements
We had a chance to build a website for a UK & Irish official Apple Tech Distributor. The client’s existing website had usability issues and wasn’t adhering to user interface industry standards.
They reported that users weren’t buying upsell products. Also, we noticed problems with website speed and complexity with interactions after products have been added to a cart.
The project also came with a set of challenges, including strict Apple Human Interface guidelines and some Magento development restrictions (we had to develop efficient solutions with strict time limitations).
Some of the smaller UI challenges we also solved were:
- Clarified complex Dispatch & Delivery Info;
- Provided informative product descriptions, but kept the design clean;
- Made a complete redesign of the Website menu, Product details page and other key pages.
We were able to build our UI component library in a way that the majority of it was reused when we started to build a B2C project for this client, saving both time and money.
Pharma: Buyer Journey Optimisation
Large Irish national pharmaceutical network chose us to create a new B2B website. Their existing one had major UX- and UI-related pitfalls that were costing customers their time, and our client their money.
During our exploration phase, it became clear through user interviews that customers were having significant usability problems. Product ordering was especially challenging as the only way they were able to find products was searching for each one individually. An unoptimised user journey added unnecessary friction to the process.
The main design goal here was to present users with the website that had detailed information about the products. We set out to do so in a way that users would be able to see categories, lists of popular, and recently ordered products.
Our experience working with B2B clients for over 2 decades has shown us that buyers are often repeating the same order for the most popular products. By saving past orders and showing the most often purchased complementary products, not only does the buyer save time, they also tend to increase their average order value.
Ordering multiple products and checking out shouldn’t be a draining and time-consuming task. Our job is to make these websites both aesthetically pleasing and to minimise the amount of clicks, to keep customers satisfied and shopping longer.
The project is still in progress and we will be happy to share the results with you in the near future.
Conclusion
Monsoon Consulting has been serving clients in B2B commerce across many verticals for over 20 years. Our designs are the backbone of the development process, underpinning not just the aesthetics and brand image online, but the performance and usability across the customer journey.
Are your customers not happy with your eCommerce experience? Get in touch with the team of experts at Monsoon to discuss our full-service agency offering.
