- Employer: Unleashed Technologies
- Client: Dixon (aka Dixon Valve & Coupling)
- Related Organizations: Pronto; Hubspot; Salesforce
- Roles: Solutions Architect; Business Analyst; Information Architect; Digital Strategist; UX Strategist
- Technology: Drupal; Drupal Commerce; a custom ERP, "DDS"; Pronto ERP; Hubspot; Salesforce
Dixon—formally “The Dixon Group, Inc.”—is an industrial manufacturer based in Chestertown, Maryland. This company has worldwide distribution centers and regional websites that sell—B2B—to distributors. They specialize in hose couplings and other products that impact various industries.
Challenges
The Drupal 7 websites are primarily a product catalog with product resources and supportive information. Built with Drupal Commerce and a plethora of customizations, the Dixon team wanted to move to a platform that is easier to manage and scale with their needs. The new websites—US and 10 regions—need a redesign that should improve usability, credibility, reliability, and growth. Integration with multiple ERP systems, Hubspot, and Salesforce would reduce the IT and administration overhead they encounter with the current websites. Product data structure and the related handling of importation need vast improvement. Some have several hundred fields, which makes page load times and reporting a major technical problem. With over 170 product types and over 150,000 products, Dixon needs to share content across websites that will need to be translated into at least seven languages.
Solutions
Throughout the discovery, design, and building efforts, our solutions focused on:
- An improved website experience and updated platform
- Engaging product catalog, search, and product pages
- A pleasant purchase process
- Helpful product information and tools
- Easy product and content management
- Connecting with Dixon and distributors
- Learning about Dixon
The biggest challenge for the new website is rethinking the product data structure and related information architecture. We talked to Dixon’s stakeholders, including representatives from their divisions and regions. We also interviewed several distributors—Dixon’s primary website audience—to better understand their website activity, desires, pain points, and experience. This informed our design strategy for a new website and allowed us to shed any unused features.
Content features center on the creation of over 170 product types in Drupal 8 and Drupal Commerce and using no more than a few dozen fields per content type—an improvement over the current website’s five product types with over 400 fields attached to one product type. Critical for flexibility, search, and an international audience, product measurement fields now support true numeric values with both imperial and metric units of measurement that can be translated. We conducted several rounds of research and information testing to revamp the taxonomy system, which now contains normalize, purposeful, and meaningful terms to facilitate scalable search needs. If pages need to be completely redesigned, the underlying data structures were thoughtfully architected to adapt. Other content features to support the website’s information needs include: basic pages, landing pages, forms, product resources, posts, events, person pages, distributors, and locations. Not to be understated, search and navigation focus on the core activities and context that users and Dixon highlighted during our design process. Navigation thoughtfully reorganized menu items and labels to better align with user expectations. Search provides options that can scale with product and content data.
Since there are multiple websites that support regions around the world, there is content specific to each website. This is provided by Drupal’s multisite features, Drupal Commerce stores, Drupal’s Domain module, and Drupal 8’s new translation interfaces. All content structures remained very sensitive to information reuse and ease of translations to lower the overall cost to manage content.
Dixon’s custom “DDS” and Pronto ERP systems are integrated with the new website to support distributor account management, purchases, and product data syncing. We worked closely with Dixon’s IT team to build and test these interfaces for better performance, reliability, and flexibility with these platforms over Dixon’s planned growth.
The content migration was very complex, moving to the new website’s majorly restructured information architecture. Product fields that are mostly text-only were reshaped into structured data fields. Taxonomy relationships were normalized and incorporated data from multiple sources. Content with lower volume was manually migrated to allow greater control over the appearance on the new websites.
There are dozens of forms and supporting automation that help users with purchasing and learning about Dixon’s products. Tutorials and detailed technical specifications help engineers safely use Dixon products. These are features that we rebuild for the new website in a way that is easier to maintain through the life of the website.
Dixon’s new websites will accommodate their needs, and the needs of their customers, while reducing management costs so they can focus more on improvements.
Results
When the new Dixon websites launch, the KPIs that we defined will be measured along with other metrics to help learn what continuous improvements can be prioritized. These KPIs include:
- Lead generation
- Sales volume
- Customer satisfaction and support
- Education and training content consumption
Dixon will meet with Unleashed Technologies on a monthly basis to review observations and consider recommendations. Please see my presentation on how to create and use a Performance Measurement Framework for more details.