Contract Chair website
The Contract Chair Company
- UX, UI & website design
The Contract Chair Company expertly matches the needs of the hospitality furniture industry with products from over 300 trusted UK & European manufacturers, resulting in a huge range of approximately 2500 pieces for furniture.
The project we undertook involved designing and building a completely new website in order to re-invent their customers digital experience. Aimed at commercial interior designers, the new site needed to make their vast and extensive range of furniture available within a creative digital hub style website. As well as needing to have an A-game user experience (UX) that included mobile friendly layouts, Pinterest style user owned scrapbooks and option selectors, the website required state of the art product search functionality and Salesforce CRM integration.
Disciplines: UX & UI design / Web design
Getting the user experience (UX) right
This website was going to be big in both size and stature. So, once a sitemap had been agreed, the team set about making interactive wireframe prototypes for desktop, tablet and smartphone screens.
The wireframe process involves the creation of each page of the site, but in a very basic format. Images, text and buttons are represented by boxes and outlines, allowing decisions to concentrated around the hierarchy of content and placement of specific elements. The pages are then linked together to create an interactive, but non-coded, version of the site. By building a basic structure in this way, ideas can quickly be trialed and shared for comment without costly Photoshop processes or coding, and provide a space where the user experience (UX) can be carefully crafted.
Adding the user interface (UI)
Next, those all important creative design elements were added into the prototype. Buttons were created, colours chosen and images added, providing substance to the framework and really bringing the site to life. The client had access and could view progress in real-time, while conference calls were held to review and gain feedback at each fundamental stage.
A collaborative approach
To ensure each part of the project was expertly handled, we teamed up with our development partners Kloc who undertook the build of the site, and the development of the CRM Salesforce integration. This approach worked perfectly and our designed prototypes helped the developers too as each individual element could be exported from our software in a pixel perfect format, ready for them to use.
Happy clients and a fantastic website
The project has been a huge success. The Contract Chair team now have a fully integrated website that is the backbone of the business, while providing an excellent digital service and a useful creative platform for their interior design customers. Check out the website here
"We approached Planet to design the front end of our new website. Planet have been very attentive to our initial spec, came back with well thought through designs and during the whole process proved very responsive to our ever-changing requirements. I would definitely recommend Planet and we will undoubtedly use their services again"
Amiran Chanchibadze - Company Development Manager