Christie's
Founded in 1766, Christie's is a world-leading art and luxury business spanning 46 countries. In the traditionally tech-resistant art world, Christie's witnessed a seismic shift during the pandemic. As online bidding surged amid evolving behaviours and expectations, we were tasked with transforming search and discovery across digital touch points — embracing a more user-centred and contextually relevant approach. goals of delivering a more personalised experience.
Measured Outcomes — Improved search engagement and SEO with traffic growth increasing by over 30%, where practically all were new visitors. Including increased traffic to new Artist Pages YOY coming from both organic and paid search. CTR to sales and stories from search increased by nearly 30% up from previous year.
Challenge — Christie’s are in business of selling rare objects. By definition, most of the time, they don’t have what people are looking for when they are looking for it. Over half of all searches on Global Search returned no upcoming results, where buyers weren’t provided any relevant suggestions. We needed to reduce bounces and exits, removing the cumbersome navigation paths that led to dead-ends and increase clients propensity to transact.
Before getting lost in the day to day, our focus was to pave the way for big ideas. By Synthesising research and data insights, we diagnosed customer and business problems, conducting workshops to establish vision and strategy. This encompassed analysing existing experiences, empathy mapping, generating ideas, and prioritising them based on their potential impact.
Collaborating closely with the product owner, stakeholders, and engineers in iterative sprints, we prioritised key problems to enhance engagement promptly within our broader objectives. Our initial focus was on revamping search functionality, streamlining UX, and refining filtering options to facilitate user navigation. This involved creating new artist, browse-all, and category pages, alongside improving result relevance to match client queries precisely. We devised design solutions, conducted testing, and iterated swiftly to launch the MVP within a tight timeframe of 4 months.
Analysis revealed that horizontal filter themes on auction pages achieved higher engagement and click-through rates (CTR) to items. Building upon this insight, we developed a more contextual search interface utilising horizontal menus, perceived by users as having better usability. By simplifying complexity and exposing content and features progressively, we enhanced user experience. The new design significantly increased engagement and CTR, providing a solid foundation for ongoing evolution across the customer journey.
Seventy-one percent of searches focused on specific artists, brands, or authors. Launching 500 new artist pages tailored to user browsing habits boosted traffic and offered relevant suggestions for items, sales, and content, fostering ongoing discovery. We established a scalable framework for the new artist and category pages to accommodate future feature additions seamlessly.
Build more relevant suggestions and new CRM capabilities that allowed users to follow artists and save alerts, capturing preferences and increasing returning users. Combined with new suggested search capabilities and lot recommendations based on searches and related artists, provided a more targeted experience to inspire clients.
Art Advisor is an image recognition and valuation tool to help Specialists value lots quicker and accurately, completing valuations more seamlessly. Specialists waste a lot of time trying to identify matches to requested items. They needed an easier way to match items, be provided relevant cataloguing suggestion, and auto-populate comparable lots as part of wider valuations.
