Baker & Taylor - Digital Catalog Migration
Print Design + UX Design // Dec. 2012
One of Baker & Taylor's primary advertising vehicles is its publications - generating over $5MM in annual co-op revenue. Originally circulated as traditional print magazines, the company began to migrate these publications over to a digital format in 2011. The original goal of this digital conversion was to simply connect a customer's reading experience directly to the online shopping point-of-sale.
However, as an increasing number of publications were digitized, many user experience issues became apparent in these one-to-one conversion examples. As a result, prominent "Buy Now" buttons were designed to better guide users as they shopped. Additionally, questions were raised about the magazine's screen resolution and legibility. To address this, I designed an entirely new magazine template with larger navigation, clearly legible typography, social media integration, and a mobile-friendly page size.
NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENTS
- Redesigned twelve digital catalogs.
- New, optimized layouts led to a 60% increase in customer transaction.
- Included two new advertisement size formats to sell to publishers and introduced multimedia integration.
This is an example of one of the featured multimedia layouts. On the left, users are presented with a featured title. On the right, a multimedia element (a YouTube book trailer in this instance) is found at the top, followed by an article about the title or author.
The newly designed Table of Contents enhanced the user navigation process by giving them up to three, broad category headers, in addition to the detailed list of genres from which to select.
