Kendra Scott is making its digital experience shine with fast, actionable insights from Contentsquare

Key metrics

The company

Kendra Scott is a global jewelry and lifestyle brand, founded in 2002 with just $500 and a vision. 

What began as a small jewelry line in Austin, Texas has since grown into a billion-dollar brand known for its bold use of color, innovative materials, and signature silhouettes—all while remaining rooted in Austin.

Kendra Scott’s mission is to inspire customers to shine bright and do good in their communities, and their website is an extension of that vision.

The Kendra Scott ecommerce team—made up of user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) designers, product managers, and merchandisers—works closely with developers to craft a seamless, beautiful online experience that brings the Kendra Scott brand to life.

The challenge

In 2023, Kendra Scott introduced a jewelry collection: Yellow Rose by Kendra Scott. But what was once just a collection has since flourished into a sister brand.

Until recently, however, the Yellow Rose website experience didn’t reflect this. Kendra Scott’s ecommerce team was tasked with elevating the Yellow Rose brand by digitally distinguishing its website from the Kendra Scott website.

This wasn’t just a question of visual rebranding. It would demand a comprehensive redesign of the site’s user experience. 

The site required a lot of improvements, including

• More efficient use of space—-too much white space was leading to user disengagement

• Responsive design and general updating in line with current web trends

• New, flexible website components the ecommerce team could easily change and update

To pull this off, the UX/UI design team (headed up by Edward Rendon, Senior UX/UI Designer at Kendra Scott) needed detailed, visual, and easily accessible insights into user behavior to help them make data-driven decisions to improve the customer experience. 

As a team of designers, not analysts, they also needed this behavior analytics to be self-service, making it easy for their team—not to mention the ecommerce team, and all digital teams across the organization—to surface, interpret, and action insights. 

Fortunately, they had Contentsquare to help them.

The solution

The ecommerce team redesigned the entire pre-checkout customer journey for Yellow Rose, including the homepage, top navigation, product listing pages (PLPs), and product detail pages (PDPs).

Throughout the project, the team made extensive use of Contentsquare’s experience intelligence platform to understand how customers actually use the site, and what needed to be optimized.

“We use Journey Analysis and Funnel Analysis a lot, but my best friend when it comes to Contentsquare capabilities has been Heatmaps” says Edward. “It’s so useful to be able to see what users are interacting with and where they’re scrolling to.”

The visibility Contentsquare gave Edward and the design team into customer behavior means they weren’t forced to rely on guesswork and personal bias when designing site components.

“Contentsquare shows us precisely how customers are interacting with the site. It’s brought objectivity and transparency to our process. It means our decisions aren’t based on opinions or gut feeling.”

Edward Rendon

Senior UX/UI Designer

Revealing unexpected user behavior, informing UX design decisions using zone-based heatmaps

One way Contentsquare informed the design of components was through an unexpected discovery the team made when analyzing how users interacted with key pages on the Yellow Rose site. 

“Zone-based heatmap analysis of the homepage and our PLPs showed us that customers were navigating in a lot of different, and surprising ways,” said Edward. “They weren’t just using the top navigation menu or hamburger menu on mobile. They were using the entire page to navigate to different categories.” 

This insight led the team to focus on creating navigatory components that could be distributed throughout the homepage and PLPs.

“Contentsquare showed us that users don’t always use navigation menus to jump to other categories—they also use the page they’re on. This insight was critical because it meant we weren’t only designing components that marketed different products, but also components that helped users with navigation.”

Edward Rendon

Senior UX/UI Designer

Validating customer feedback at scale with Contentsquare

As powerful as it is, when it comes to assessing user experiences, quantitative behavior data alone isn’t enough. There’s also a need for qualitative data..

One form of opinion that Edward and the team values highly—but which also requires analytics to back up—is customer feedback.

“User testing is very important to us,” says Edward. “For example, jewelry is a visual and personal purchase, and one of the most common user testing feedback we received was customers wanting to see more real life photography to get a true sense of scale and quality before purchasing.”

This user feedback informed the central theme of the site redesign: using ‘full-bleed’ photography (photography that extends to the edges of the page or screen) to reduce white spaces, and create immersive, visually striking experiences. 

While such feedback is often useful, it’s not always easy to tell if it’s just a minority of customers who feel a certain way. Luckily, the team had Contentsquare to validate this feedback by contextualizing it with on-site behavior.

“With user testing you get a lot of insights anecdotally from a small sample size,” says Edward. “But with Contentsquare you can really validate those insights at scale very quickly.”

Accelerating research with Contentsquare’s AI, Sense

While research was a big part of the UX/UI design team’s redesign work, their main focus was on execution: designing and building site components. 

Thanks to Contentsquare’s AI, Sense, the team carried out the behavioral analysis they needed to discover what users want with speed and ease—despite not being trained analysts.

Using Sense’s built-in AI assistant Sense Chat, they simply had to enter natural language prompts and within seconds get an in-depth analysis of user behavior or page performance. 

This came complete with an appropriate visual chart, key insights highlighted, and suggested follow up actions.

As a result, they didn’t have to wait for analysts to run reports for them. This considerably sped up the research process—giving the team easy access to visually powerful insights that could be shared with stakeholders to secure rapid buy-in for their decisions.

“Sense has really sped up the process of researching user behavior. As part of a small design team, you don't really have a lot of time for the research side if you're responsible for executing, so getting a shortcut to those insights via AI was tremendously helpful during the early stages of the design process.”

Edward Rendon

Senior UX/UI Designer

The results

The introduction of new, flexible, and responsive components on the Yellow Rose website (with guidance from Contentsquare) is helping drive more engagement and revenue.

Results from the early funnel redesign include

• Double digit conversion rate increases on the homepage (+52%), PLPs (+74%), and PDPs (+14.3%)

• Double digital bounce rate decreases on the homepage (-35%) and PLPs (-25.7%), plus a significant decrease (-8%) on PDPs

• A +3% increase in scroll rate on new PLP pages

• A +10% increase in session time on PDPs

Along with these impressive improvements in metrics, Contentsquare has had a big impact on how effectively the ecommerce team can work, by

• Accelerating time to insight with self-serve, AI-powered analytics that remove the need to wait for trained analysts to run reports

• Freeing up time for execution by making research fast and accessible

• Enabling data-driven decisions and overcoming the need to rely on gut feeling

• Validating customer feedback at scale by connecting feedback to behavior

• Helping to secure buy-in from other teams and stakeholders with powerful, intuitive and easily shared visual reporting 

“Contentsquare ensured this project was highly focused. The platform gave us targeted insights that showed us exactly how components were functioning and what needed fixing. This guided our roadmap throughout.”

Edward Rendon

Senior UX/UI Designer

What’s next

With the resounding success of the Yellow Rose site redesign, the team are now looking to roll out the new design components they’ve built to the entire Kendra Scott website.

They’re also excited about using Sense’s growing range of automations to help continuously research the behavior and experiences of Kendra Scott website users to inspire fresh optimizations.

“With behavior analytics, there’s obviously a lot of ‘what you don’t know, you don’t know'. Sense lets us automate some of our research methods, which not only speeds up the research process, but also surfaces insights that weren’t on our radar—and which we wouldn’t even have thought of exploring.”

Edward Rendon

Senior UX/UI Designer