Overview
Keel was tasked with changing the tone of Medela’s content to focus less on the product’s engineering and technical specifications – and more on their VIP user – new mums. By focusing on their concerns, needs and feelings at a major time, we focused on supporting, not selling to them.
This new direction for Medela, and drastic change in tone of content pioneered by Keel allowed us to use this as a cornerstone providing a foundation to a more engaging and positive digital experience. We worked with Keel to help define and design an experience that reflected this change – and crafted it in a way that would also be viable to roll out globally.
This 6-month project meant aligning multiple teams across product, marketing and senior management in Medela. We ran definition workshops, helping them to define their key challenges, and align behind their potential solutions using techniques such as live wire-framing, voting and sketching (think all your favourite design sprint elements).
We then re-engineered the information architecture of the site, and designed a new experience – including the structure for all key pages, components and elements in both the e-commerce and content areas.
From wireframe to final design.
Want to get nice& detailed?
Restructuring from the human up.
Very early on the team decided on restructuring the content on the website around the journey of a pregnancy to new mum – which was their key audience. Based on the research done by external consultants and the work with Keel, this was broken into significant milestones which became the core structure for the content side of the site.
Supporting instead of selling – a change in perception.
The previous content was either very much focused on the Medela product range, or very scientific and heavy. These pieces were often structured in a very text-dense, hard-to-consume way – with images that were not always relatable. And as with many product companies, the content was very internally focused, not always considering audience needs.
First up, Keel did an excellent job of producing content created with a focus on the mums – not the products – which allowed us to design a more editorial structure to the page layouts.
By designing this new overall structure and layout to reflect news content – using sites such as the Times and Guardian as inspiration – we presented it to give a more journalistic feel to build audience trust.
We created more whitespace, and broke up the content with off grid images. Other considerations were the ability to link references, and showing contextually relevant, helpful products to the audience.
The right product – not ‘just’ the product
Information overload! The overall structure of the product pages was complicated and very technical. Products were arranged in abstract taxonomies and the purchase journey far from easy. The reality was that most of their customers were large government contracts or sold instore or online through resellers.
We redesigned the product pages to focus on 2 key things – being a place that a customer might come to when making a purchase decision with a reseller and organised in a way that would allow easy comparison between products.
A clear structure to the page was created allowing potential customers to quickly find the most relevant information to them - and allow them to make a decision and purchase quickly.
nice& Impactful
The final structure, design and experience were initially implemented globally barring the US (which initially had a separate team and design, but as of putting this case-study together has now taken the solution we developed). Medela started to see higher levels of engagement almost instantly, with much longer durations of users staying and consuming more content. There was an uptick in direct sales as well.
Internally there were some major benefits. From an efficiency point of view, by having a modular set of components, consistent navigational structure and visual alignment, more time was spent focusing on the what, not the how when it came to regional variance.