Amcor Products
UX Designer
Visual Designer
DELIVERABLES
Impact
Redesigned Amcor's product section for the global packaging manufacturer in a 4-week engagement, cutting the section's bounce rate by 99% (39.48% down to 0.26%, per Google Analytics) and doubling product search usage within a year of launch.
Background
Amcor is a global B2B packaging manufacturer supplying brands like Coca-Cola and Nestle. Their products section on amcor.com was barely functional: an oversized carousel dominated the page with nothing else to do on it at a standard laptop screen size, key product names were unreadable over the background image, and the search that did exist ran on an out-of-date, incomplete product database rather than a real one. A Sydney contact recommended me to Amcor's Global Head of Digital, and I was brought in for 4 weeks to fix it.
The Brief
I wrote the brief myself: the products section had usability issues and wasn't serving Amcor's audience well in helping them find the product information they needed, wasn't transparent to users about how Amcor served its clients, and wasn't supporting Amcor's own internal business processes either.
Approach
I originally scoped a proper 3-month process: stakeholder interviews and an internal process review, a full round of user research and testing with 10 users, wireframing across 5 page templates, then a UX review of the visual design and build. But the business needed it done in one month to fit their existing digital sprint schedule, so I compressed it to Business & User Research, Personas, and Wireframing, with one further week added later for Visual Design. I made the case internally that as much research as possible still mattered, and set things up so the next round of site improvements would carry on the research I couldn't fit in.
User Research
With 4 weeks total, I interviewed Amcor stakeholders in Zurich and the US by teleconference, wrote a usability review, a competitor review and a Google Analytics review, and worked with the Australian team to set up Hotjar for heatmaps and session recordings of the current site. I also commissioned a short user survey, 3 responses across each of 3 persona types, covering what packaging buyers actually need to choose a solution and what frustrates them most about existing packaging sites.
The research surfaced Buyer, Technical and Marketing personas, and the same frustrations kept coming up: not enough technical data, poor product imagery, difficulty finding the right filters, and no way to compare sustainability at a glance. It also surfaced a bigger problem underneath all of it: there was no real product database behind the site. About 346 products were held as CMS fields in Kentico, not in a proper database, so before search or the product pages could actually work well, the underlying data needed structuring, which I scoped alongside the UX work for the business to build after handover.
The Redesign
The new products landing page let a buyer search by product or keyword, then optionally narrow by packaging form, material, feature, property or process, matching the filters each persona told me they actually wanted.
The site detects the user's location to set their continent in search results and their country as the default in the enquiry form. Draft visual designs were handed over and further polished by Amcor's build team before launch.
Results
Comparing Google Analytics for the products section from October 2016, before launch, to October 2017, a year after:
- Bounce rate dropped from 39.48% to 0.26%, a 99.34% reduction
- Product search usage doubled
- Average time on page increased while page views dropped slightly, suggesting people were reaching the right product page faster and actually reading it once they got there
Live Site
Screenshots of the finished, live amcor.com/products after launch:
