Wayfair: Upholstery Vision
What?
My goal was to develop well informed, detailed mobile mocks representing multiple points along the user journey. I intentionally approached this vision work without thinking about our current technical constraints. Doing this gave us a strong point of view of what we want to work towards.
Why?
Our team had a focus across 200+ product types, and we were often context switching from project to project. We invested time to define the ideal experience for users shopping for sofas and sectionals, and have seen promising results from the projects coming out of this work. Limiting ourselves to these product types allowed us to focus in on our qualitative and quantitative research, understand the user problems, and co-create solutions based on that research.
Team
I was the sole designer on this project, working with product management, merchandising, analytics and engineering partners.
Process
I balanced holding multiple touchpoints along the way for my stakeholders with prioritizing heads down time as a team to work through our findings. There were periods of research, synthesis, collaboration, workshop facilitation, ideation, and refinement.
Initial Research
I reviewed past user research, created and synthesized a usability test to understand the friction points from our quantitative data, and conducted interviews with service reps to understand post-purchase issues. I discovered some surprising behaviors, one in particular being that most customers aren’t looking for a specific style. Together with my analytics, merchandising, and product management colleagues, I summarized our findings and drew connections between data types to identify overall trends.
Snippet of notes from interviews with service reps.
Sample from our list of key trends after research synthesis
Design Sprint
After conducting our research and identifying opportunity areas, I led a two day design sprint for our stakeholders and representatives from the team. I wanted to align on our longterm goal, our focus areas for the design work, and to generate ideas from a wider group than just the core team.
Selection from Miro board activities
Design Phase
Following the design sprint, I worked on ideas across the user journey. We decided to work on mobile designs only for efficiency reasons.
Whiteboard sketches
Detailed designs
Validation & Final Designs
We validated our ideas with five users, assessing speed of task completion and paying close attention to feedback on the opportunity areas we identified in the beginning of the process. We got helpful constructive and complementary feedback, and iterated ahead of our final deadline.
Ideas for the Product Detail Page
Following Projects
Our team has seen promising launches coming out of this vision work, from a ‘comfort scale’ for judging product feel online to a redesigned product options experience that streamlines the page. The vision project enabled us to move quickly on these following projects, and the results indicate that we correctly identified key customer problems in this research. We haven’t completed a final read of these projects (layoffs and a reorg shifted our priorities) but early reads indicate increased engagement with ‘free samples’ and directionally positive PDP ATCR + CVR rates. Both projects can be seen on the site here.