Sterling Furniture

Project description

A huge project to completely redesign and reinvent this Scotland based furniture company’s eCommerce site.

Sterling Furniture sell a huge range of furniture, homewares and decoration services across their 8 stores, which meant the first part of this project was simply trying to work out how best to categorise all of that to help users find what they want, with a combination of product hierarchy and relevant filtering and sorting options. This was further complicated by the customisation options available on certain product ranges – namely sofas and beds.

I wanted to create a site that was simple to use, but also offered Sterling plenty of space to highlight and cross promote their products based on what the user is looking at, on related trends and product popularity. Creating different areas and spaces to do this in slightly different ways across the site was key in creating a site that serves as both an online store and source of all information and content when it comes to furniture and interior style.

Project details

• Client: Sterling Furniture
• Category: IA, UX, UI
• Data Created: Summer, 2015

Different product pages display detailed filtering options (with up to 5 different areas that can be filtered). These could also be combined with promotional content areas and cross promotional call-outs where required, such as with a brand range of furniture that might contain products across a number of categories or styles.

Customisation of sofas allows the user to browse through a number different options, whilst always having visibility over all the selected options, price and delivery repercussions. Product pages such as these also had areas of cross/related products and ranges where customers were looking to buy a number of items.

The store pages were not only a source of information on each store, but a way in to introduce the faces and people that work there. We also wanted to use these pages as a way in to some of the new interior design and styling content and services they wanted to offer.

As a way to help promote Sterling’s ever growing interior design services, I wanted to use a specifically created section of their previously underused blog to allow their stylists and designers some space to talk more about what they can do for you. So each stylist would have their own section to talk about ideas, thoughts and inspiration on things going on in the world of interiors and design.

The article template was designed to be flexible and easy to use for each stylist to add and build their own content pages, creating simple to read but narratively engaging pages with a splash of each stylists’ own personality. It was also important to be able to cross promote related products so whatever was being talked about was also within easy reach to purchase.