AUCKLAND UNIVERSITY PRESS

Auckland University Press is New Zealand’s leading scholarly publisher of books. The organisation aims to celebrate the talent of the university’s scholars by publishing and distributing their work.

The aim of this project was to increase traffic to the website and to promote sales, along with refreshing the appearance of the website in general.

A key feature for the website was to include the author and illustrator of each book as a category of their own, so that users can navigate the site’s products by searching for their favourite authors and illustrators.

Deliverables:

• CMS design
• User Experience design
• User Interface design
• Ecommerce build

Visit website

PLANNING

Large scale projects such as these often start with a sitemap in order to establish a clear plan for page layout.

Author and product discoverability was a key focus for this project, a sitemap helps to map out where we see features like this sitting within the site’s architecture.

WIREFRAMING

Wireframes help to establish the content structure for each component and each page. With a focus on author and product discoverability we can plan where we want to display cta buttons, images, etc in order to guide users towards a specific outcome.

Designs even as early as these are utilised in user testing sessions. The lack of any dominant UI features often reveals interesting insights.

SOLUTION

The finished website looks gorgeous and makes browsing the stores content easy and engaging.

It celebrates the artwork of the books and puts the author and the illustrator at the forefront of the experience.

PRODUCT SORTING

The ability to sort by an author or illustrator is not normally a feature that ecommerce platforms offer. Custom solutions within the platform were created in order to allow for this feature.

To achieve this we created the search by author page. This page filters an extended list of authors by letter/word, making it easy for users to find the work of their favourite author or illustrator. This extended list of authors and illustrators can be edited easily from within a spreadsheet, then imported into the website.

We also set each author as a type of ‘category’ that users can interact with to find more from their favourite author. Browsing by author is now an effective way to navigate the website.

ANALYTICS

These google analytics statistics indicate the early success of the website less than a few days after launch.

• Bounce rate reduced by %17.7
• Average session duration boosted by 0.5s
• Pages per session boosted by 1.1

Today the stakeholder boasts that they are now making more than double the sales of the old website and putting the old web traffic numbers to shame.