Shurgard Self-Storage

A self-storage company that was the second largest self-storage company in the world had not updated their website in over 5 years. Although the company would later be purchased by a rival company, the results of the website update were very successful. Not only increasing year-over-year revenue by 46% but also increased rankings in search engine results organically.

Stakeholder Interviews

We conducted interviews with the people who interacted directly with the customer. From the people in the store locations to phone sales representatives to fully understand the types of questions customers had and what the purchase patterns were. We also interviewed marketing and sales as well as executives of the company to get an understanding of the principles of the company and the culture of the service they provided.

Competitive Research

Our next step was to look at Shurgard's competition, from the major companies to the "mom and pop" shops. This played a role in looking at what they were doing well and not doing well with their online presence. Everything from organization of the online reservation system to overall structure of the website.

User Research

Based on the stakeholder interviews, we created several personas to keep as a reminder of who we were building the website for and to not stray from that path. We were then able to categorize those into two major categories, residential and business customers. Each persona within these categories had specific tasks and goals they were trying to accomplish and the structure of the website was built to empower the completion of their goals.

Analytic Research

At the time, the analytics data Shurgard had in place was rather sparce. But what they did have was invaluable in the overall checkout process. The number of steps (or clicks) needed to complete an online reservation was over double the number of pages being viewed on a single visit. The solution here was to get the number of steps below average page view. The result was an increase of over 46% year-over-year revenue.

Information Architecture

All of the above information provided us a way to organize and structure the website. Everything from what was displayed on the home page to the check-out process for online reservation, payments and supply purchases. The structure of the website was search engine optimized and content was presented in a meaning manner for both visitor and search engines.

The end result was a stream-lined, search engine friendly and unique representation of the company's unique culture, as can be seen with the before and after snapshots below.