Redesigning an E-commerce Staple

As part of a small, dedicated core team,  I helped to deliver significant improvements to a critical area of a major e-commerce website.

Brand: Macy's

Role: UX Lead

Deliverables: Customer development research and analysis, feature audit and prioritization, heuristic user study, user stories, experience design, prototypes, usability research and analysis

Project Time Frame: January through October, 2015

background

The product detail page is one of the most important pieces to any e-commerce site—it's the place where customers can find out more about a particular product and, if it seems to suit their needs, add it to their shopping bag for purchase. Over the years, the product detail page on Macys.com had become bloated with a range of different features and, in terms of both visual design as well as technical implementation, was carrying a lot of clutter. The results were slow performance and a long list of usability concerns. It was widely believed that all of this impacted revenue.

The solution

By redesigning the structure of the page both in visual presentation and in code to enhance the page’s technical performance and reduce cognitive load on customers, resulting in year over year revenue increases of 3.5%, returning more than 100x the cost of the project.

To do this, I worked with product managers, developers, and a visual designer to generate potential solutions. I crafted wireframes and medium to high fidelity prototypes to both illustrate concepts internally and to perform user testing. From here, we planned a phased release approach to test our concepts further in production, eventually working towards a slimmed down page, pictured here. You can access a working prototype of an initial concept here. Visit a current product page here.

Next Steps

The redesigned page is currently live and is still in an ongoing state of iteration and experimentation. The initial success of the first round of this project as encouraged Macys.com to continue to seek improvements and maintain any successful performance and presentation enhancements.