Champion Homes Website and Brand Redesign

Champion Homes is one of the largest manufacturers of modular and mobile homes in the country. Consisting of a flagship brand and several other acquired brands like Silvercrest and Dutch Housing, Champion Homes uses a network of retailers - both internal and third party - to market and sell their homes to customers.

Earlier this year, Champion Homes partnered with Deloitte Digital to plan and implement a new brand strategy with the following goals:

• Sell More Homes - Champion wanted to generate more leads from customers visiting their website by increasing awareness and demand through a change in perception - that manufactured homes can be luxurious, instead of cheap.
• Upgrade the Website - 75% of their site visits came from mobile devices, yet an audit found that their site wasn't responsive and had usability issues on mobile.
• Unite the Family of Brands - Champion found their brand awareness was ranked low among new home buyers in a study, so another objective was to promote the family of brands through a shared experience.
• Create an end-to-end digital experience - As another method of boosting sales, Champion wanted to explore what an end-to-end platform could look like for customers and retailers to provide more transparency around the steps of buying a home and what happens after.
• Market Services After Purchase - Champion wanted to promote that they don't just sell homes, but also offer maintenance and addition services - since 80% of modular home buyers reported adding space - as a way to target homeowners as an additional revenue stream.

With these goals in mind, Champion Homes and Deloitte Digital agreed to a 7-week discovery phase, which two creative directors and I were assigned to lead. The scope consisted of the following:

• Conduct Research with Stakeholders to Craft 3 Key Personas - This new strategy was determined to affect three major figures: the home shopper, the retailer, and the homeowner. Our objective was to speak to stakeholders in order to craft representative personas for each.
• Develop User Journeys for Each Persona - Based on the crafted personas, we were tasked with creating a journey map to outline what a future state end-to-end experience could look like.
• Create Wireframes of Revamped Website - Leveraging insights from our research and personas, our deliverable was a new, modern, and responsive design of the Champion Homes website that promotes the brand and drives more leads.

We began conducting user research by reaching out to multiple retailers in the Champion Homes network, and a few homeowners who purchased their homes from Champion.

The goal of these interviews the other designers and I conducted was to simply understand the end-to-end process of buying a manufactured home from Champion, and identify what incentives a home shopper has to submit a lead and continue their home purchase.

Using the insights gained from our conversations, I put together the personas shown above for the home shopper, retailer, and homeowner, identifying what each persona's goals and frustrations are during the end-to-end process of buying a home from Champion.

Once the personas were signed off on, our team began a series of workshops with the client where we used the research insights to document and brainstorm the future journey of the home shopper, retailer, and homeowner during the end-to-end process of buying a manufactured home.

It was in these workshops that key ideas and design requirements emerged about what the new website design needed to include in order to accomplish the discovery phase goals.

After these workshops concluded, final drafts of the journey maps for all three personas were completed. These journeys are shown below.

The user journey workshops with the client led our team to prioritize the following when thinking about the revamped website design:

• Illustrating the process of buying a new manufactured home to home shoppers.
• Creating a questionnaire to help home shoppers identify what type of home they are looking for.
• Showing home shoppers what home models are popular in their search area, and how they can customize them to their liking.
• Providing testimonials to further validate that manufactured homes are a wonderful choice for a home to shoppers.

Keeping these objectives in mind, I began producing the wireframes shown below and continued iterating upon them through internal design reviews with the rest of the team.

After establishing the content layout and flows, I added styling to the interface to produce the completed designs (shown below) of the new Champion Homes website. These designs were presented on mobile to reflect their responsiveness. The following pages were presented:

• A new landing page showing a graphic outlining the process of buying a manufactured home, featured homes nearby, a quiz to help users find a new home, and testimonials from previous buyers.
• A product listing page showing key details for each house including price range and specs, with the option to filter by the different brands.
• A product details page displaying features and plans of the house, with the option to customize the design based on parameters like finishing types or exterior materials.
• A redesigned lead form that encourages the user to enter their contact details and project goals like timeline, to get them in contact with a retailer for the next steps.

At the end of the discovery phase, our team presented these final website designs to the main stakeholders from the client, who were overall very impressed by the modern aesthetic, emphasis on the storytelling of the process, and seamless integration of the other brands into one platform.

Afterward, the client expressed interest in signing on for another phase to develop these designs and continue building off of the user research done, of which negotiations are currently taking place.