Julian Sherr | Portfolio

Bustin Boards is a Brooklyn-based skateboard company founded in 2001. As senior growth designer, I helped scale their sitewide conversion rate by over 38% through a ground-up redesign, working in collaboration with the founder, CMO, and operations team, as well as managing a developer.

Summary

Increased DTC skateboarding brand’s YoY conversion rate by over 38% through a research-informed redesign, ongoing sitewide optimizations, and a thoughtful landing page strategy

ROLE

Senior Growth Designer

Timeline

Much too short

Timeline

Much too short

Platform

Responsive web

Link

Visit Site

Overview

I worked with Bustin Boards as senior growth designer at Moonshot Brands, an ecommerce aggregator who had recently acquired them.

The existing site had a number of issues:

I worked with Bustin Boards as senior growth designer at Moonshot Brands, an ecommerce aggregator who had recently acquired them.

When I joined the team, we identified a number of areas for improvement on their existing site:

Information architecture

Bustin’s taxonomy was needlessly complex, with unnecessary intermediary landing pages one had to go through to access PDPs, and dedicated PDPs for each product variant. Altogether, this made the catalogue quite disorienting to navigate.

Bustin Board's overarching taxonomy was quite complex, with several intermediary landing pages one had to go through before being able to access product pages. Additionally, each product variant had its own PDP, making the catalogue somewhat disorienting.

Non-standard design patterns

For example, rather than using a prototypical hamburger menu, Bustin's mobile menu was a full-width CTA pinned to the bottom of the screen. Additionally, PDPs used dropdown menus rather than segmented buttons for variant selectors with just 3-4 options.

Visual design

The site had a number of visual design issues encompassing alignment, visual hierarchy, typography, and more. As one example, the site used a condensed font for body copy throughout its entirety, impairing readability.

Page size

Bustin's website was heavily peppered with auto-playing skate videos. On one hand, this was apt: skaters love watching skate videos. On the other hand, many of these videos exceeded 100MB in size!

Research was scrappy but targeted, and included heuristic analysis via Baymard Institute, voice-of-customer email surveys, GA/Shopify analytics analysis to identify underperforming pages, and founder/CS conversations to surface buried value propositions and commonly asked questions.

Before and after images below:

A ~10% increase in visitors who made it to PDPs, likely the result of simplifying the site architecture and removing unnecessary intermediary landing pages

An ~18% increase in add to cart rate for visitors who made it to PDPs

A ~7% increase in checkout completions for visitors who added products to their cart

Outcome

When the redesign launched, the site experienced an immediate 38% increase in conversion rate, which came from all steps in the funnel:

When the redesign launched in September 2022, the site experienced a ~40% (MoM) increase in sitewide conversion rate, which has held (YoY) through H1 2023. This increase came from all steps in the funnel:

A ~10% increase in visitors who made it to PDPs, likely the result of simplifying the site architecture and removing unnecessary intermediary landing pages

An ~18% increase in add to cart rate

A ~7% increase in checkout completion rate