Clipsal by Schneider Electric was established in 1920 and is Australia’s number one brand of electrical products, accessories and solutions for the residential, commercial and industrial markets.

Clipsal prides itself on being the most forward thinkinh and skilled business in the Australian electrical industry, providing the market with the most technologically-advanced electrical solutions. They have been working with Luminary for more than 8 years on various digital products. 

My role

– UX Research
– Information architecture
– User experience
– Art direction
– Design management

The project

– Re-design & re-brand
– Completed at Luminary
– Launched in July 2019

This project was to re-platform their primary website and product catalog whilst along the way introducing a more modern user experience. 

As the principal designer I analysed & presented the research and rationale, worked with the client and managed designers who would be brought in to the project on-and-off as deadlines and budgets required. I was the only design resource that remained on the project for the entirety of it’s duration. 

First I undertook a process of review; combining information from Google Analytics, heat mapping, surveys and screen recordings from hot jar and interview with users, website editors and Clipsal management. 

This painted a picture of a site that had been left behind. I discovered that it adhered to an old architectural model of having a strictly siloed area for each persona. For Clipsals content managers it suffered from inconsistent approaches to changing and updating various areas. Mostly, it was slow and difficult to find what you needed. 

These slides outline general experience flaws on the old clipsal.com

The research very clearly hilighted the requirement that their customers self identify as a “Consumer” or “Trade” user was a huge roadblock, as more often than not, the information both were seeking was in the other silo. This approach is how Clipsal referr to their customers internally and their architecture mirrored their inward perspective. 

 A second barrier was the mobile response, which was difficult to use and inconsistent with the desktop. This was a crucial problem as our research found that mobile and tablet access for their site was high, especially with their trade persona who we discovered were using the site to look up product specs at job sites. 

We presented this research back to Clipsal, with a range of recommendations. The most urgent being a complete change in architecture - removing the silos. The second most urgent being an update to the interface to fit the more modern devices their customers were using. 

These recommendations were backed by visualised data and quotes from the research, which were critical with getting the wider management team at Clipsal on board with the sweeping changes.

Key information such as prices or part numbers were only available on the trade site. There was a strong internal view that most users didn't want that information. These are slides from the presentation presenting the research that showed otherwise.

The first of these was the development of a new wholistic architecture, which dealt with different user personas on a page content level rather than siloing into site sections. 

I then undertook further consultation with the marketing team, while building a set of functional wireframes which were validated internally.  From these I developed a system of core elements and components that could increase the flexibility of templates for the marketing team.  

After taking the core elements from wireframe to design, we designed component up, rather than page down. This had the benefit of modularising the interface from the very start and made developing device responses and building various page mockup much more efficient. 

This ultra systemised approach has become integral to my process as an interface designer. And based on the success of  development for Clipsal, I have lead and managed the introduction of systemisation and component-isation company-wide. All new projects at Luminary are approached with a "system first" methodology and I work closely with my design team to continuously improve and extend this process. 

While the site launched in July 2019, this project is being managed under an agile project management style and is still in the process of rolling out; the current development focus is aligning the designed filtering experience with Clipsal’s legacy product catalogue. 

The team at Schnider Electric created this video to showcase the site internally and kindly let Luminary share it. Starring in this video is Sam Yousef our direct report at Clipsal and Luminary owner Adam Griffith. 

More selected projects

The elevator pitch.  

I’ve been creating parts of the internet for more than 15 years and I’m completely in love with the digital medium. Design has the power to change the world and I work to be on the positive side of that change. My special skills are information architecture, user experience, mentoring and opening stuck jars.

Want more? I've written more; what it's like to work with me, and what I do for fun. 

Previously.

Creative Director at Bliss Media 
— 1 year, 1 month

Senior Designer at Reactive
 — 5 years, 11 months

Designer & Front end developer at Immersive 
— 5 years, 9 months

or call me +61 417 592 978