ListenUp

Position

I’ve always enjoyed building excellent content and designs, and when I found out that ListenUp, Colorado’s premiere Hi-Fi dealer, was hiring and that their corporate headquarters was just down the street I jumped at the opportunity. I had always admired their retail stores but felt their web presence didn’t convey the company’s prestige in the way that their stores did. After being hired I spent a few months planning a new user experience and optimizing their online product display. The challenge came from multiple competing interests in the company with retail stores competing over page real estate with custom theater design departments who also competed with commercial sales. Our end solution created a flexible and attractive online store which we packed with product data making it a successful tool retail and custom sales staff, and helped bring the strong, sophisticated brand that ListenUp carries in their stores to their online customers. In September of 2010 I left ListenUp to travel for a year in Central America and Mexico while learning Spanish.

Context

ListenUp has specialized in Hi-Fi audio for 40 years. They design some of the finest residential and commercial home theaters in the midwest and the products they sell come from the highest pedigree of audiophile equipment. So I was surprised when I found their online presence didn't match up to their in-store experience. I joined the small web team and working together with great people like George McClure and Phil Murray we revamped the website to convey the experience of what it's like to visit a ListenUp store, and widen the online product selection so that we could better serve or customers who couldn't make the trip to one of the retail locations.

Process

I grew up in a house with an audio engineer. I knew that this would bring my own bias into the design process, so I toured the different stores, spoke with customers who had custom theaters or listening rooms built into the homes, chatted with the sales team, and worked with the commercial division to try and come up with an online presentation that would convey the prestige that ListenUp carries.

We looked a number of competing websites but differentiated ourselves with a darker color palette, and named all of the different listening rooms at each of the stores so that customers who have previewed the rooms online first could come in and ask to see the "Reference Speaker Listening Room" or the "Library Theater."

Reflection

I'm really proud of the work that I did at ListenUp, we received a great deal of praise from vendors such as Sonos, Peachtree Audio and many others. Online sales increased during my tenure and we produced several video segments where we interviewed industry leaders and talked to them about upcoming trends in digital audio, surround sound, and wireless audio. ListenUp is a really great company with some wonderful folks who are super passionate about their field.