OVERVIEW

At NETGEAR, a key aspect of my role is to enhance the eCommerce platform on NETGEAR.com. This is a crucial responsibility as direct-to-consumer sales are a top priority for the company; NETGEAR’s long-term goal is to become it’s own largest online retailer. Thus, these improvements are critical to NETGEAR’s success and involve collaborating with multiple interdisciplinary stakeholders.

User Flow

In the initial stage of this project, our team collaborated with numerous stakeholders from various departments to define the requirements for our eCommerce platform. While this process was time-consuming due to the number of stakeholders involved, we persevered with ongoing discussions and collaboration until we identified the most critical priorities. These include account creation, service attachment, and the ability to drive traffic to flagship product detail pages (PDPs). Once the core functionalities were established, I created a user flow to visualize the required Figma prototypes for building the platform. This also helped to ensure alignment among all stakeholders involved in the project.

Initial Prototype

After the wireframes were approved, my next task was to create multiple Figma prototypes that would expand on the wireframes and fill in any gaps that were overlooked. This included developing the interactions for the navbar interface, PDP experience, and checkout flow. As previously stated, it was crucial to prioritize the integral features of these prototypes, particularly service attachment. Using these prototypes, we were able to identify the components that required user testing based on stakeholder feedback, and these prototypes served as the initial point for internal review.

User Testing

After careful consideration, we decided to test several components on the PDP, as this was all that budget would allow. I began prototyping said experiences to present to the testers, which included variations of the twister module, product description, and overall layout of the modules. These were tested on usertesting.com and the script/testing structure was built in collaboration with an external resource that I personally brought in. We had six small groups each test one of the three components on either mobile or desktop. The results served as a source of truth for not only my team, but also stakeholders, as each of them had different opinions/priorities that often conflicted with one another.

Product Page

After establishing PDP best practices via user testing, we were able to combine the top performing components to create the revised experience. This included a compact version of the twister, creating less of a barrier for the user to scroll down and select the add to cart button. Furthermore, this experience uses the most compact version of the product description, adding to the aforementioned benefit. Based on the testing results, we retained the same layout for these components, as we found no significant advantage in rearranging them.

NavBar

In addition to this above revisions, the initial prototype for the navbar underwent internal review with all stakeholders, which provided me with adequate direction to build the revised experience. This led to the elimination of redundant features in the navbar and the expansion of the cart/login flows, as some use cases were not considered during the initial development.

Checkout Flow

Lastly, the prototype for the checkout flow was tweaked per internal direction. This included a refresh to the user login phase, as the old design was not intuitive. We also made adjustments to the service attachment interface, ensuring that legal statements were clearly communicated to users, and that each tile included a marketing message to further encourage attachment. Finally, an “in stock” or “out of stock” message was added to individual items within the cart, as well as a marketing message promoting our home installation partner, OnTech.