A generation of American homeowners glued to HGTV and pinning & repinning house photos were increasingly seeing their homes as an extension of their personalities and not merely a place to hang your hat.
agency
Mirum
Client
Andersen Windows
Product
Site Redesign + Strategic Realignment
Research and Process
Andersen is one of the giants of American window manufacturing and I had the very good fortune of being within an hour’s drive of their headquarters, showroom, and manufacturing facility. This gave me an opportunity to interact with everyone from the C-suite to the craftsmen on the production line.
Conceptual Framework
Andersen’s web site was wildly out-of-date and required a generational shift in approach to both the structure and design of modern digital platforms. Honestly I think their previous site was hand-coded html without even any CSS: let alone contemporary asset, content, and social management.
Navigation
Mobile
Tiered mobile navigation can prove challenging. We often lose context of the hierarchy of multiple levels of subnavigation. By using iconography and allowing for a variety of touch interactions we could provide context to the visitor’s current location in the experience without sacrificing the choreography as we weave through sections of the experience.
Widescreen
On the desktop screen (more common for our user-base) we had the luxury of more real estate to allow for several states of navigation.
We used this space to provide movement through the site; to educate; and act as muse to inspire homeowners to follow their own creativity in their project.
Customization breeds Iteration
Even though there are standard sizes and materials, each and every window ordered from Andersen is made-to-order. Unless you’re buying from the shelves at your local Home Depot, you are ordering a truly custom product direct from a manufacturer. With dozens of finishes, glass types, and hardware options and virtually infinite variations of sizes a robust customization experience was mandatory. With the sheer variety of possibilities, I looked well outside of the industry and ended up with a customization experience that shared much more with automotive and computer specificity than it did with construction materials. There were a lot of iterations for this thing.
Administration
Ultimately Andersen Windows’ site would be administered by non-technical staff. That meant building a robust content-management system and predicting the types of content that might be created long after the site was launched (and our updates and maintenance budget would run out!). So a variety of customizable layout modules was created so that years later the site would still feel “designed” and intentional regardless of how new content was added.
