HON

Case Study

HON

After four years online, HON.com, once an industry-leading website, had become outdated and unorganized. Surveys and focus groups had determined that the website was serving as an adequate product brochure, but consumers needed more help to determine which office furniture products would meet their needs. Primarily, consumers were asking for better product photos, price and availability.

Goals of the Website Redesign

Lead consumers to a buying decision: Throughout the use of the various features and functions on the website, we wanted users to leave ready to purchase a specific HON product and to be able speak intelligently to their boss or whomever they're buying for about the decision they've made to buy HON.

Increase brand awareness: With office furniture becoming more like a commodity and domestic companies being challenged by cheap Chinese imports, we wanted to use the website to reinforce the value of the HON brand to its end consumers to lead them into their local dealer asking for HON by name.

Speak with one voice: Design the website to give the appearance of being in the same family as print collateral. When consumers see any printed literature and also the website, we wanted it to be immediately obvious they are from the same company.

Client Profile

• Industry: Office Furniture for commercial, education, healthcare and government
• Products: chairs, desks, filing cabinets, panel systems and tables.

Old Website Problems

• The site's product database was based on groups of furniture, not specific pieces of furniture. This made displaying a price and a photo for an individual piece of furniture impossible.
• Copy was written from engineering specifications. Bullet points such as "Dual-clutch posture control" did not give consumers a clear picture of how this chair feature might affect their comfort.
• Desks and panels are made up of many components, but to see those, as well as the dimensions, site visitors had to download a PDF file for each product.
• Fabric, finish and paint swatches were shown together on a single PDF file. This gave consumers a view of everything available, but it was not product specific which resulted in consumers asking for fabrics and finishes that were not available for the products they were purchasing.

JGSullivan's Approach

• Build a robust product database based on individual SKUs to give more flexibility of the use of that product data on the website.
• Add List Price to each product on the website to give consumers a basic idea of the pricing they might expect without quantity discounts.
• Add Request Quote functionality that allows the consumers to request pricing quotes from any product page on the site, without having to enter in model numbers or descriptions. Quote requests are sent to preferred dealers, along with models and descriptions from the site's product database.
• Organize products into subcategories that make sense to consumers. Instead of classifying office chairs as either wood or steel, the new website offers categories such as executive, conference, task, guest, etc. This is more inline with the way consumers think of furniture – where it will be used; rather than what material it's constructed with.
• Display compatible furniture on each product page. When a consumer is shopping for a desk, for example, this takes the guesswork out of deciding which file cabinets, chairs and tables, work with or match that desk.
• Add Flash demonstrations and animated gifs on chair spec pages to illustrate ergonomic functionality.
• Group together individual furniture components for desks and panels into typical configurations with one feature photo. Also, list each component's name, price and dimensions right on the product page so the consumer knows what's included when purchasing the furniture.
• Show product-specific fabrics, finishes and paints for each product on the website. The product page shows the most popular colors and clicking a View All link shows everything available for the specific piece of furniture the consumer is considering.

Results

• HON.com is again leading the office furniture industry with a website that makes it easy for consumers to make pre-buy purchase decisions.
• The website is helping to close the loop between consideration and purchase by leading the consumer directly to their nearby preferred dealer with enough product information to ensure HON is purchased over a competitive manufacturers' product.
• Better photography and navigation help consumers spend more time looking at product information on the website, rather than continually clicking back to category pages to blindly click on links.