Building deeper engagement for leading Australian building product manufacturer.

James Hardie Australia is one of Australia’s largest manufacturers of fibre cement and exterior cladding products, supplying builders, architects, designers, renovators, and homeowners across residential and commercial construction projects nationwide. Through brands such as Scyon, the company offers a wide range of modern cladding systems designed for contemporary architectural applications, including products such as Axon™, Matrix™, and Stria™ cladding.

As digital expectations within the construction industry continued to evolve, James Hardie partnered with Soda Digital to redesign and engineer a sophisticated new digital front-end experience capable of better showcasing the Scyon product ecosystem while dramatically improving usability, content discovery, engagement, and site performance.

The project was so much more than a visual redesign. Soda Digital was engaged to simplify complex customer journeys, improve web performance across devices, streamline navigation through a very large product catalogue, and create a scalable CMS-driven architecture capable of supporting future growth and content operations at scale.

Soda Digital approached the project through a highly collaborative and UX-led process focused on improving usability, simplifying customer journeys, and creating a much faster and more intuitive digital experience. The engagement began with extensive discovery and strategic planning including content auditing, competitor analysis, content relationship mapping, migration planning, and user flow definition across multiple audience segments.

This early investigation work helped identify where users were experiencing friction and where navigation, content structure, and page hierarchy could be dramatically improved. Soda Digital then developed and tested multiple information architecture structures and wireframe concepts to validate how users interacted with products, systems, educational resources, and inspiration content before development commenced.

This iterative UX process played a critical role in improving usability across the broader platform. By testing and refining layouts, navigation pathways, and template structures early, the project was able to create much clearer and more goal-driven customer journeys.

The result was a significantly more streamlined user experience where visitors could discover products faster, move more easily between related content, and engage more deeply with the broader Scyon ecosystem. Visual presentation was also elevated through cleaner layouts, stronger hierarchy, curated imagery, and more immersive product presentation designed to better support architectural inspiration and product exploration.

From a technical perspective, Soda Digital engineered responsive front-end templates optimised for mobile and desktop performance while ensuring the site remained maintainable and extensible over time. Performance optimisation formed a key part of the engineering approach. Faster page loads, responsive layouts, optimised assets, and cleaner frontend architecture helped create a smoother browsing experience while improving accessibility across devices and connection speeds.

This performance uplift was especially important for mobile users researching products in real-world construction and design environments where speed and usability directly influence engagement and conversion. Soda Digital also designed scalable CMS workflows and DevOps processes to support efficient content publishing, structured content management, deployment automation, and future platform growth. SEO strategy, analytics planning, migration workflows, and post-launch optimisation processes were also incorporated to help preserve search visibility and improve long-term digital performance.