Andrew Reiss Malika Khan Bjorn Anderson Elyza Proctor Kyle Sullivan
Marketing Branding UX Design
Marketing Intern
The Missing Link pet supplements and solutions were already beloved among pet parents. The only aspect of their repertoire that was missing was a modern, responsive, and user-intuitive e-commerce presence. That's where we started. I was part of a team tasked with revitalizing the e-commerce experience for The Missing Link as well as refurbishing their branding decisions. My duties included wireframing for the website, UX development, and optimizing their content for search engines.
Before our intervention, there was a missed opportunity for new users and existing customers to access and seamlessly purchase all products the brand had to offer. End goal: to keep users engaged and informed throughout the purchasing funnel.
Building an e-commerce experience that spoke to both avid users of the brand as well as newcomers seeking a better solution for their pets would lead to a stronger market presence. Creating not only a website, but a foundation for the brand to utilize as a means of generating brand awareness to a retargeted audience of millennials. Building an e-commerce marketplace that looked great in terms of design, and was also built for efficient marketing.
DAN ANDREWS, Customer
It was important to keep the scope of this e-commerce facelift to a reasonable breadth and depth. Although it would have been easy to bite off more than we could chew with a holistic brand paradigm shift, we focused on actionable goals within the e-commerce sphere (listed above).
One of the main points of emphasis that drove the design of the website was brand awareness. Because The Missing Link was in the process of re-tailoring their company to appeal to a millennial crowd, it was important to take into account those newer users who have never used or even heard of The Missing Link.
The team put a focus on generating SEO-optimized content that educated users on The Missing Link’s products, how they’re made, and putting the customer's pet’s health at the forefront. We found that the best way to present that content was through a simplified and direct user interface and experience. A responsive full-width layout and complementary use of vibrant and neutral colors is what allows users to be able to effectively navigate the website.
The content that the team produced to live on the site educates the users about the topic and serves as an added design aesthetic for the site. All of the content was styled and placed deliberately keeping in mind the brand’s identity, their offering, and the millennial audience they aim to reach.
As with all e-commerce platforms, you want users to convert – specifically,
you want users to buy. The challenge for us was to create a comprehensive balance between the number of regular, e-commerce product pages and non-product pages that are meant for content creation and re-iteration, SEO rankings, and educating the user all at the same time. Our approach to this was to utilize internal links from those pages to various relevant, strategically-placed aspects of the site.
We worked with The Missing Link’s team to create a fully-responsive e-commerce solution to help support their marketing efforts — one that properly represented The Missing Link not only as a brand, but also as an experience, and as a lifestyle. Its pages and the web copy that lives on them are ever-building in SEO value, which drives up visibility and thereby users to the website.
Working closely in collaboration with the Web Development and SEO departments allowed us to finish key deliverables ahead of schedule.
Additional design opportunities include further exploration of the checkout flow and logo work.
