The Home Depot

Experience Architect | e-Commerce - Appliance Parts & Services Configurator

2013-2014

Appliances are the most expensive items sold on homedepot.com. I redesigned an interface to reduce the abandon rates for these high dollar items, and simultaneously cut down on rescheduled installation appointments by ensuring correct parts & services at purchase.

I designed an interactive modal which allowed the user to select a ZIP code to view store availability, and then select required and optional parts before continuing to checkout and selecting delivery options.

Opportunity

Basically, customers would get a consistent experience all the way up until the point when they’d attempt to configure their appliance accessories, when they’d be a shown a drastically different page. This loss of trust and skepticism about the quality of the experience led to a high volume of abandonment for these high-value SKUs

An initial discovery team sketched some concepts for how we could improve the experience and the three main options were to:

  1. Redesign the current page to brand standards

  2. Enable the user to select parts and services directly from the product page

  3. Build some type of modal in which the customer could interact directly from the product page AND cart


Research & Design

I designed low and medium fidelity prototypes of each of the three scenarios in Axure, and tested them in conjunction with our user research team to determine which method users preferred.

Resoundingly, users preferred the modal as it allowed them to contextually equate the parts and services with the appliance from the product page, and also allowed them the exact same experience if they had to configure it at the last moment from the cart before checking out.

After extensive usability testing of the modal concept (for which I was awarded another internal recognition for rapid prototyping), we determined that this was in fact the most favorable approach to facilitate the user’s flow through the experience while keeping them focused on the checkout process.


 

Impact

Now, the user considers an appliance from its product page, enters a ZIP code and is immediately able to view availability. Then they may add the appliance to their cart, and are shown an on-page modal to add optional and required parts and services.

Once done, they can continue shopping, or go directly to the cart where they have the option of changing their options or updating their ZIP code.

The entire experience keeps the user on the contextually relevant product page, reduces cognitive load and in conjunction with the updated cart / checkout styling, ensures a visually congruent experience.