Design: Cabela's
Summary: A complete functional and visual redesign of the commerce and information site for Cabela's, the premiere hunting, fishing and outdoors retailer in the United States. Long a successful catalog and more recently a popular retail company, Cabela's wanted a site that would push a third of its revenues (upwards of $1 billion a year) to the Web and offer its fiercely loyal but very demanding customers more consistent contact with their favorite company.
Problem context: In late 2000, Cabela's approached ATG to redesign all aspects of their Web operation, from technical architecture to content management to functionality to visuals. An old-school catalog retailer with rabidly loyal customers, Cabela's was finding that its current home-grown Web site could barely handle the load, let alone allow them to pursue more robust product offerings and personalization initiatives. Even in its crude form, the site was handling more than $100 million in orders a year, and was teetering on collapse.
Project goal: Increase revenue coming into Cabela's from the Web by designing a site that: amply demonstrated the breadth of products offered at Cabela's; emulated the popular print catalog with high-quality and sizeable product shots; allowed customers to enter product numbers from the catalog easily into the Web; provided personalization functionality through targeted cross-selling and targeted email campaigns; accommodated both expert and novice Web users with an easy-to-browse and -purchase interface; displayed customer account info to lessen the burden on customer service telephone operators; provided customers with feature articles and other non-product information relating to hunting, fishing and outdoors activity.
Target audience: Cabela's customers specifically, and hunting, fishing and outdoors enthusiasts generally.
My role: Led the creative team which identified and specified business and user requirements; interviewed Cabela's customers on-site at stores; led development of all functionality, UI design and visual design; authored feature specification quantifying functionality; primary client contact for all matters relating to user experience and visual design.
Homepage
The Cabela's homepage displays the breadth of the Cabela's product selection as well as conveys the ambience of the outdoorsman; this outdoors mystique is also central to Cabela's catalog and retail stores. "Shop by catalog item #", where users can enter numbers from the catalog, is a prominent button to the left.
Store Home
The gateway to all of Cabela's products. Again, the display of the breadth of selection was an overriding priority. Cross-sell items appear as well.
Hierarchy display with images
With Cabela's large product set comes the difficulty of displaying all product advantageously. A truism of catalog retailing is that the product image sells much more effectively than any name or description. Thus, we moved images of product as high up in the browsing hierarchy as possible.
Product display: Boots
Cabela's customers love the catalog: they read it like a magazine, treasure it, paw through it repeatedly. We wanted to reproduce, even improve upon, the catalog experience. One way was to display even larger images of the product than the catalog, and include longer (and more colorful) descriptions. This and the next several screen shots will show product pages that, we hope, met the expectations of the catalog-obsessed Cabela's customer.
Product display: Binoculars
Product pages had to accommodate the complex array of product warning and notes. This page notes restrictions applying to these binoculars.
Product display: Scope
Some Cabela's products were of a complexity that defied normal pull-down selections for product attributes. For these products, we designed charts that would relay information as well as allow users to add directly to cart once they made their decision.
Product display: Gift Certificate
To quote the client: "If nothing else works: the gift certificate page better work." Gift certificates are gigantic moneymakers for retail companies. It has to be easy to understand, supply the customer with flexibility, and have gift-giving functionality built in.
Product display: Jackalopes
Ever want a jackalope? Here you go.
Shopping Cart
Always a complex page, we made the shopping cart very simple and easy to understand. Note the ability to toggle to view item notes for certain dangerous items in Cabela's inventory; in this case, a black-powder rifle.
Review Order
The page where a customer is asked to click "Place Order." This is another page where a great deal of information is presented to the user; it's best done simply and cleanly.
In the Field Home
The gateway to Cabela's non-product content. In the Field acts as a community and content area for Cabela's customers. In future revisions of the site, cross-selling in In the Field will drive more sales to the retail side.