Blog: With great brands come great design challenges

Jigsaw24 is the largest supplier of Apple products to the UK’s creative industry. With such tech savvy customers, the company’s site needed to hit the mark in terms of its UI (user interface) and the experience of using the site for research, advice and purchasing.

Having ordered Apple products through Jigsaw24 ourselves, we knew that it has fantastic customer service and expert advisors, and a strong, unique brand identity. However the website was letting the side down – the navigation was difficult to use, requiring many more clicks than you’d hope to get to the product you want, and the bold brand wasn’t coming through, either in terms of look and feel or the customer experience.

Reflecting the brand

So, that became the basis of the brief: create a site that was an extension of the way customers interact with the brand elsewhere – through friendly and knowledgeable staff and print design work that captures the vibrant brand in a market that can seem dry and where products often look much the same. Being intuitive and easy to use was paramount.

The key was to consider all of these things while designing and building each part of the site. We made use of the core brand elements: a strong orange, an informal hand-drawn script typeface (drawn by the design team at Jigsaw24 themselves) along with illustrations in the same loose style and friendly photos of the actual people you’d be dealing with. It all came together in a site which is eye-catching and modern while also being clear and friendly.

From browsing to buying

Look and feel is one thing, but what the site really needed was to make the find-and-buy process a breeze. A pleasure even. In order to achieve this we used clear navigation, intuitive and intelligent filtering on list pages (that change according to the product-set) and a slick product comparison tool.

All of this means that any product list page feels customised to the products being shown (from the vast catalogue), while comparing that long list of all-important specs is very easy.

“With an abundance of information, it’s sometimes hard for customers buying technology to decide on the product right for them,” says Matt Duncan, Head of Client Services at BT Fresca, “but with the enhanced search and filtering ability on the new website, customers can make an informed decision by comparing multiple product choices.

“We hope we’ve provided a website that shows just how ‘Insanely great’ Jigsaw24 really is.

jigsaw24.com