A lack of design thinking

According to the Design Management Institute, design-driven companies outperform S&P by 228% over ten years (source). This is consistent with what we are seeing from companies like Apple. They have outperformed competitors for well over a decade.

In fact a growing number of companies are investing in improving their design skills. For example IBM have hired over 12,000 designers to help improve their offerings.

Of course BMMI is not in the tech sector like Apple or IBM. But it does rely on technology to deliver their products and services. Design is a crucial component in their business success. Unfortunately judging by their existing digital offerings, design is not currently a priority across the organisation.

For a start there are serious issues with the design of these platforms. Fundamental problems such as readability.

Poor readability

The most basic need any website must address is that it is easy to read. Unfortunately this is not the case on many of the BMMI websites.

La Vinoteca Barcelona is an attractive site. But the background images and small text make it challenging to read. The BMMI Group site also uses small text made harder to read by being italic in places. GSS suffers from a small line height that makes text appear squashed together. Reading on screen is hard anyway, but these sites only make the problem worse.

Since these sites were design and developed, screen resolutions have improved considerably. Unfortunately, this has meant that small text appears smaller.

Text heavy

The problem of legibility is made worse through the extensive use of text. Both GSS and BMMI Group make little use of imagery to communicate messages. Most of the imagery that does appear is superfluous. There is little use of video, infographics or photography to help convey key messages.

There is also little variation on text styling to aid scanability. There is some use of headings and bullet points. But there is little contrast in these and no use of other typographic devices such as pull out quotes.

Take for example the GSS 'Why Us' page. Compare this to a similar page on a charity website. The large headers, layout and use of imagery makes the charity more engaging and readable.

Design inconsistencies

Good design is not just about legibility and pretty graphics. It is also about providing a consistent experience. Unfortunately this is another area where a lack of design thinking by BMMI is evident.

The BMMI Group site is a good example of this. There are inconsistencies in link styling and the placement of navigation. Some pages for example have sub navigation while others (like About us) do not.

Limited calls to action

Unfortunately the design problems are not limited to legibility and design inconsistencies. Calls to action also suffer. This is disturbing as good calls to action create return on investment.

As we have already written, the restaurant sites have inconsistent booking mechanisms. This means that you cannot track the effectiveness of the sites.

As there is no outward email communications plan, GSS does not encourage people to contact them beyond a small link in the navigation bar. BMMI Group has no newsletter signup to keep investors and the media informed.

Even Alosra has only limited calls to action. It makes little effort to upsell beyond a few offers and related products. As we have written before in a previous report, there is much more that Alosra could do.

For example, Alosra (unlike BMMI Shops) does not link to products from its recipes. The functionality has been developed to add all ingredients from the recipe into the cart. However, this was removed due to the lack of products listed on the website. This is a clear example of a 'non-digital' task seriously impacting the effectiveness of the website to create a return on investment.

As there is no email marketing or email marketing strategy in place, the site cannot encourage people to sign up to a newsletter. This means that the only newsletter call to action is a tiny text link in the footer. For a channel that, on average creates $38 return on investment for every $1 spent (source), this is a wasted opportunity.

The BMMI Shops site suffers from similar problems. For example the main call to action on the homepage is to select a category and start shopping. Yet these categories are hidden under a dropdown menu while less important options are displayed on the main menu bar.

Some attempt has been made to highlight the categories by making the menu item red, in line with BMMI branding. Unfortunately red is a colour that has been proven to perform poorly online, often leading to a decline in the number of clicks.

Finally, the BMMI shop blog is another example of a lack of calls to action. Despite the blog post almost always being a in-depth profile of a product, there is often no link back to that product in the shop. This is a wasted opportunity to encourage sales.

The lack of calls to action is a strong sign that BMMI does not yet value design thinking. Thinking that goes well beyond aesthetics.

Poor Performance

Site performance is a key consideration for digital design. 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. What is more, a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions (source).

Unfortunately BMMI suffers from performance issues across all its sites. The most obvious examples are the requirement for a loading screen on La Vinoteca Barcelona and the processing message in BMMI Shops checkout. But this is not the only issue. BMMI Shops scores a low 52 out of 100 on Google’s PageSpeed tool. This will not only damage the user experience but also impact the sites ranking.

The poorest performing site is Alosra despite us highlighting the issue in the past. The site scores only 48 out of 100 using Google’s rating. When tested, the homepage contained 3.6mb worth of data and took an average of 8.4 seconds to load. This will have a significant negative impact on sales and has been raised as an issue multiple times.

Part of the problem for Alosra and all other BMMI sites is that there is no established program of evolution for the sites. A key factor in design thinking and one that will address issues like performance.

No program of evolution

Best practice in digital design explains that we cannot launch a site and then stop working on it. Instead we must constantly be improving and developing the site to ensure it is working at peak efficiency. Periodic redesigns are not enough to optimise a website. This is because until you can watch users interact with it you cannot identify how to improve the site.

Modern ecommerce sites have a continuous program of multi-variance testing. This helps identify ways to keep increasing conversion. Take for example the Wiltshire Farm Foods website in the UK. That site had an ongoing roadmap of improvements over a five year period. Improvements that raised its revenue by 10,000%.

Unfortunately Alosra has only done periodic redesigns. Redesigns that have failed to address more challenging problems with the site. For example product imagery is still weak despite this being a well documented issue. This is, in a large part, due to the lack of dedicated digital resources within the company. For those dedicated resources that do exist, the business is not structured in a way that is conducive for quick and easy updates to be made. This is a key issue that must be considered.

BMMI has not updated the GSS, Vinoteca and BMMI Group sites beyond minor content changes in well over a year. Each time the sites have been redesigned, because of the lack of iterative development, the entire site has been replaced. This means the good has been thrown out with the bad. There is no sense of evolution with any of the sites.

Poor platform integration

Finally, design thinking acknowledges that a website is just one channel. The way people interact with a brand is complex. It spans both digital and non-digital touchpoints. There should be close integration of different channels, especially between social media and websites.

Unfortunately there is little evidence of this kind of thinking within BMMI. Integration is limited to social media icons on the majority of sites and a link back to the sites from their respective social media channels.

There is no call to action on blog posts or recipes to encourage users to share. Neither is there the ability to comment on these.

On the Alosra and BMMI Shops websites, there is no ability to register using social media credientials such as a Facebook, Twitter or Instagram accounts. The easier it is for a user to complete mundane tasks, the more likely it is that you will see a growth in sales.

Due to the slow pace of change and implementation of recommendations on the Alosra website, rarely is there even a link back to a product page when these products are shared on Facebook. Missing products, poor performance, lack of real time updates etc have created a disconnect between the website and an effective social media strategy.

Finally the restaurant sites fail to promote positive Trip Advisor reviews on their sites.

In short, each channel stands on its own. There is little attempt to encourage movement between them.

Recommendations for introducing design thinking

In today’s marketplace every company has to be a design led company. Design thinking is more customer centric, more agile and more competitive. But achieving this requires cultural change and adequate resourcing. So we recommend the following steps.

• BMMI integrates design thinking into the organisation by establishing their own in-house design team. They cannot continue to rely on outside agencies. This does not transform internal thinking.
• BMMI establishes design patterns that they can use across sites. A universal design language that ensures consistency and reduces the cost of evolving design. A design pattern flexible enough to incorporate different users and brands.
• BMMI establishes clear calls to action for each of its digital services. What is it that they want users to do?

These are recommendations we will explain in more detail within our digital strategy.