Introduction
PC Garage is a Romanian online store, launched in 2005. It’s the second biggest local online retailer in terms of sales, after eMAG.ro.
PC Garage positioned as the best retailer for computer components and processors. They are targeting people who are computer savvy and passionate about building their own machines.
Slowly, a strong community was building up around the brand, mostly computer passionate people and gamers. They launched a forum where people could post about their wishlists, ask for advice or show pics with the tunned cases they were building.
Situation
Identity
When they launched in 2005, they needed an identity to reflect the personality of the brand: a friendly place where you can order and build your own computer. Later on, a good website design was required, in order to sustain the growth of the company.
Website
Although it was converting very well, the website lacked a proper integration with their growing community and needed a way to accommodate video reviews and forum discussions.
The initial website design was also a bit heavy and dated and didn’t placed the focus on the user experience.
Goals
I needed to identify the things that worked well like focus on the product features, the good conversion rate and brand awareness. Also we set a few new goals that we need to achieve with the new design.
Stilistically, the new ecommerce design should be more clean, flexible and adaptable to various desktop and mobile platforms. Also, we needed to find a solution to integrate the community into the product page design.
People were posting videos and were written product reviews on the forum. Also, they shared wishlists and shopping cart content and asked for advice. One of our objectives was to reflect these into the website category or product page.
A few new features needed their place into the new design: Returning products meter, price evolution and alerts and a very advanced filtering and search feature.
Solution
Initial Identity:
The business needed a good identity to start with and reflect its voice. I used a “techy” typeface resembling a computer board circuitry.
Website design
A good product page is the most important asset an online store could have. Here, people decide to buy the product or not. That is why the design of the product page needs to be very simple, but also able to help the customer make the right decision.
The homepage of the store is like a front window. Statistically, this is the place where people land if they type the URL in the browser’s address bar directly. Usually they are returning visitors that are looking for special offers, have a browsing history on the website, or they are looking for accessories or consumables for the products they bought in the past.
That is why, the homepage contains several sliders and carousels with special offers, accessories for the products bought in the past, option to search in the website for a specific product or the option to subscribe to the site newsletters for special offers.
It’s very important for the customers to have access to all the information regarding the buying and shipping process, the store address and contact info, what are the available payment methods and returning policy. All that information is present in a newly created “Info Center”.
Mobile versions for all the pages were also designed.
New MyGarage.ro Identity
The community forum also received a new identity. A very personal, hand written “my” was attached to the word “GARAGE”.
A nice rabbit character was also created for supporting the online store marketing efforts.
The rabbit appears as a ninja or as a cyborg in various campaigns throughout the year:
