New Work - Improving the path to product for Tory Sport through data and heat mapping.

We recently helped the team at Tory Sport rethink the homepage experience within their ecommerce platform, using data to identify opportunities to improve the path to product.

Originally launched in 2015 by Tory Burch, the Tory Sport line of athleisure wear extends the collection into tennis, track, surf, and golf wear. The Tory Sport site was successful in launching the new brand and introducing an overall platform that set the tone for classic and refined style. But as with most new digital platforms, change was needed, and an adjustment to the layout, format, design, and interaction of the homepage was a priority in ensuring those visitors that were new to the brand would easily find their way to content and product, and eventually to checkout.

Our redesign of the Tory Sport homepage

Making holistic design changes to navigation and page structure requires a lens into existing user behavior. In this case we relied on existing web analytics and heatmapping to help guide our planning and design approach. Our review of web analytics looked at a 9 month snapshot of user data. We identified trends in the usual metrics and how this data connected to conversions. We also looked at variants in data across desktop and mobile web. This gave us a clear sense of where changes needed to be made to address existing painpoints for visitors.

For heatmapping we used Hotjar, a tool that tracks and visualizes how users are moving through an experience, what they’re interacting with, and what they’re clicking. We wanted to understand how users were interacting with existing points of conversion before making our recommendations. This heatmap data was invaluable in showing where users were getting hung up, or what navigational items were getting overlooked, perhaps because of copy, design, or placement.

Tory Sport Heat Mapping

Following our Pre-Spring work which focused on lean research, we ran a Concept Sprint to arrive at a recommended direction quickly. We designed a streamlined navigation system along with an improved page grid and modular system to make the homepage adaptable to seasonal campaign imagery, featured categories and products, and social content. Our goal was to provide a flexible solution that would feel both refined and elegant to the user, and something that the Tory Sport team could build on over time.

Tory Sport Mobile E-commerce Site

As a take away, the Tory Sport homepage refresh is a great example of how iterative optimization can help move a brand forward quickly and efficiently. A complete redesign of the entire platform is not always the best approach. In fact, we strongly believe in the value of a roadmap in providing prioritized, ongoing, and incremental improvement to a platform, product, or service. These small changes, that users may be unable to recognize, can often put a multiple on conversion rates, and extend the shelf life of the platform.

Interested in optimization through data and design? Curious about our ecommerce capabilities? Reach out to us to find out how we can help.