FN America

FN America is a premium firearms manufacturer that traces its roots all the way back to the late 1800s and legendary gun designer John Browning. And FN’s weapons are still used today by the U.S. military. Who knew?

Well, we were confident more people would after we architected and redesigned FN’s website on the heels of a successful online ad campaign. Site visitors would also gain a deep understanding of an extensive product line.

While reviewing the existing site in our user experience (UX) discovery phase, we noted FN’s impressive history and military cachet weren’t prominently featured. We believed it was an important connection to make with the potential customer, that these were trusted, distinguished products worth every penny.

We also found the existing navigation to be somewhat cumbersome, and it wasn’t really easy to find specific weapons, depending on whether you were a civilian consumer, law enforcement, or military.

Our vision, hand-in-hand with the client, was to resolve these and other issues for the three prominent user roles for the site – sales, dealers, and media. To help facilitate, some unnecessary components were eliminated from the old site, and we created personas to aid the consumer search – concealed carry, home defense, tactical, competition, even collector.

Then we streamlined the navigation around this and the product categories themselves. Our focus was to showcase the weapons (that’s what customers want to see, after all), make it easy to pick a category, find a price and availability, and locate a dealer.

Our UX and development teams employed fresh taxonomy and an ingenious dynamic breadcrumb process to allow us to reduce duplicated product data, which was loaded according to user flow. Product presentation was beefed up, including image enlargements and 360-degree views, and we applied WooCommerce to refine features such as training-class purchases.

FN wanted a website of which it could be proud and one better than the competition, which in essence would be any other firearms manufacturer whose line a dealer would carry. It would fortify FN’s motto: The World’s Most Battle-Proven Firearms®.

We can confidently say – as a showcase for products, support, and, of course, history – FN’s site is of the highest caliber.