Project Debrief: Honey Stinger Design Review

Client: Honey Stinger

Industry: Food and Beverage

Type of project: Design Review

Client Challenge: Honey Stinger stood at the precipice of a significant marketing push, but their outdated website presented a dual challenge. It needed to echo the brand’s core values and message while simultaneously driving sales through its e-commerce component. Amidst the pressure of incoming traffic, they sought clarity: How can they redesign and transform their site into an experience that not only resonates but effectively converts?

1. Immersion + Insights

In an agile response to Honey Stinger’s tight timelines and budgetary constraints, we anchored our approach in an expert-led design review, known as a heuristic evaluation. This wasn’t just a superficial scan. Instead, we immersed ourselves into their vast reservoir of customer insights, dissected the intricate details of their marketing collateral, product assortment, and critically analyzed the website’s performance metrics. Further depth was added by understanding their membership and ambassador programs. To ensure that our suggestions resonated with the brand’s goals and stakeholders, we facilitated exhaustive interviews and collaborative brainstorming sessions with key personnel across marketing, website management, and other pivotal domains.

2. Creative Exploration

Recognizing that a robust foundation was key, we recommended a meticulous refinement of the website’s information architecture to seamlessly accommodate Honey Stinger’s expanding product range. With a tailored navigation system, we emphasized enticing product imagery, intuitive linking, and seamlessly integrated the shopping experience with brand education. Our vision was realized through a modular component that underpinned their product strategy by categorizing items into ‘prepare’, ‘perform’, and ‘recover’ groups. Grounding their e-commerce space in authenticity, we interspersed rich narratives from their athlete ambassadors, constructing a trust-laden buying journey for customers. A visual tool was introduced – heatmaps for individual pages, offering a tangible representation of content distribution. This not only enriched the site’s design ethos but also provided an insightful dashboard for strategic deliberations.

3. Realization and Rollout

Delving deep into the fabric of Honey Stinger’s web presence, our tailored strategies bore fruit. With the senior marketing team and website custodians now on the same wavelength, the path forward became crystal-clear. Our bespoke sketches and design guidelines laid the foundation for an enhanced user journey on the website. Beyond mere aesthetics, we explored content strategy nuances, facilitating informed client decisions. The collaborative spirit we nurtured was appreciated; our insights not only hit the mark but illuminated their strategic roadmap for the foreseeable future.

4. The Bottom Line

The real proof of our intervention’s success manifested not just in metrics but in the glowing testimonials from our clients. Evidently, with our guidance, Honey Stinger’s website was primed to handle their anticipated surge in marketing-driven traffic. The strong partnership we built was further underscored by their continued engagement with us, approaching us with new ideas and valuing our feedback on imminent website alterations. Having been so deeply involved in reviewing the designs, we’re emotionally vested in their success, always willing to go the extra mile.

To address the client’s number one goal of content fragmentation, we created a content strategy mapping of competitors and their existing site.

The client’s second goal was to understand how to improve their current design incrementally while still providing a great UX. We conducted a page-level analysis with sketches of design improvements.

Content mapping of existing honeystinger.com pages provided an overview of how their content was distributed and prioritized throughout the site.

We conducted a detailed content and hierarchy analysis of several industry competitors including Athletic Greens.

Design improvements impacted each page, including their menu system and footer navigation.

We examined and highlighted areas for improvement of key e-commerce and product education pages, providing clear priorities and wireframes for design changes.

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