CIOs/CMOs: In B2B eCommerce - User Experience (UX) is the Cornerstone to Successful Everything
Digital transformation
NMB Technologies Corp.
NMB Technologies Corporation (NMBTC) is the world’s largest manufacturer of miniature ball bearings and a volume leader in the design and manufacturing of precision electro-mechanical components, backlights, and LED lighting products. The company provides advanced technology solutions for smart cities, medical, automotive, and industrial markets, and also defense-related special components, magnetic clutches, and brakes.
NMBTC online catalog is immense containing many thousands of parts. The company had received troubling feedback from sales that the website was simply not meeting customer needs in key areas. The challenge wasn’t just externally focused. NMBTC also did not want to move off its existing web content management (CMS) at this time. Stretching the boundaries of what one normally expects from WordPress, every time the TechFabric team rolled out a new module, the staff was trained in its functionality, making it easy to uptake and increase their existing skills with the familiar WordPress platform.
Key Areas To Remedy:
Easy and Successful Search for the Right Products
Quality and clear communication of information
User-Friendly Interface
Successful Promotion
Strategy
Know Your User
An obviously critical persona, NMBTC’s customers, often highly skilled design engineers and analysts, mostly come to the NMBTC site knowing what they want.
When a customer does something differently than they had planned, that is another way you can drive differentiation. The customer needs to be empowered to change on their own. There are specific moments when you should invest in the digital experience. Here are the key steps the TechFabric team took to transform the NMBTC website into a top-performing asset.
Solution
Revamp Home Page
The team began by showcasing the company’s most important Industries on the right-hand side, adding a prominent “featured product” element, easily updated from the CMS.
Solution - New product database
Better Visuals, More Intuitive Navigations
This was an important step as products were not easy to find, and there could be many variants of the same or similar products. Specifications must be clear and easily compared for this busy and highly technical audience. TechFabric upgraded the database schemas allowing for better search filtering helping users save time and find the products they need faster.
Higher quality and volumes of images coupled with a new main navigation component provide a more refined and intuitive product categorization. While creating the digital experience so that it’s as seamless as possible, there are certain levers you can build in to help the customer analyze and evaluate options, or drive a behavior change. The lesson we can take away is we can lean into that and build experiences that allow for and reward this self-reflective learning.
Solution - interactions
Create Value Through User Affordances & Interactive Content
Education users via Interactive Content add value. Another factor in creating a delightful user experience along with positive influencing effects is micro-copy and micro-interactions.
These minor touchpoints of usability increase value for the users and lead to better engagement. For example, provide tips on how to use your site with component micro-copy, then test the respective copy for continual optimization. You can also incorporate behavioral economic principles such as “digital nudging” to help guide user behavior when making choices or selecting options (UXDesign Bootcamp). These nudges can take the form of a simple icon, visual treatment, or even text. For example, a simple “right arrow” icon can entice a user and guide their behavior.
Micro-interactions are another helpful technique to engage and educate customers about products. They require users to take an active part in exploring your products or service offerings. For example, they can use interactive components to discover how your products fit their business needs.
results
Responding to User Needs
The result of the work was improved usability for both the user and the platform administrator. The key user-centered approach effectively increased traffic compared to the same period in the previous year, as well as improving the quality of user interaction with content through micro-interactions.
145%
Inbound B2B leads up first-month post-launch
12%
Increased organic traffic vs. same time the prior year
39%
Increased referral traffic vs. same time the prior year
31%
Increased direct traffic vs. same time the prior year
key takeaway
Meeting Customer Needs on Both Sides
The TechFabric team stretched the boundaries of WordPress in terms of flexibility and precision by adding all of the functionality to WordPress that an administrator would need to allow them to go in and edit without coding. Ironically, achieving that end took a great deal of manual coding and design. So, in the end, this project was not just about developing a superior online resource for NMBTC’s customers on the buy side, it was also about making it easy for the marketers and administrators to keep the website easily updated and maintained with fresh and timely product strategies.
Let’s build something amazing.
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