Blue Bayou Boats
When using a boat for hunting, your needs vary greatly. The type of game you’re after, your personal hunting style, and the terrane you’re in all need to fit the objective.
How can we fit a tremendous amount of options and information into one screen?
We wanted the configuration process to be as smooth as possible without a lot of clicking and searching for options. A lot of possibilities we considered involved multiple screens, hidden content or a lot of scrolling. I try to keep away from all of those things as much as possible.
I suggested a three-column layout as a way to organize so much content. The three columns would roughly be 1st included features, 2nd options, 3rd selections.
We wanted a look that was kind of rugged, no-nonsense without a lot of fancy fluff. No shadows no gradients. The orange was reserved for the traditional e-commerce part of the store. Below is the color material guide.
Aligning with the new brand
These inital designs also helped solidify styles with the marketing team as well as other branding and design setups.
The homepage was designed to be not just responsive but fluid. I find that with percentage-based widths there is less of a need for media queries and separate layouts for numerous different screen sizes. I try to avoid sacrificing anything on mobile and play close attention to content hierarchy.
Alligning product and marketing
Blue Bayou has a lot to offer including a fully stocked e-commerce store, pontoons, watercraft service to boat configurations with hundreds of options. Keeping these boat models and marketing efforts in line can be difficult. We update this site map or product diagram regularly.
Assisting buyers with the boat configuration
Reaching out to visitors that had expressed interest in buying a custom configured boat led to a couple of important discoveries.
We added a Save Configuration option so that buyers can come back to work on their configuration, complete the purchase, or send it to the Blue Bayou team for further discussion. These leads are always followed up on obviously, but we wanted to discover more about those potential customers that did not buy.
When reaching out, we found that many of them didn’t have the knowledge needed to make the best design choices for their specific boating needs. Hull shape, hull thickness, and transom height were particularly complex decisions to make.
To assist people with the design process we built three pre-configurations targeting fishing, hunting and a third model with a lower price point. We removed unnecessary options and standardized others.
