Laddawn.com : Redesign product finding and discovery

Design Spec

Revised charter materials Winter/Spring 2019

Artifacts of research and design process

Customer visits
How we use the catalog (survey)
Personas
Data on current "product finding" strategies
Ideation and competitive research
Design process overview for Berry CX task force
Information architecture (includes inventory of builder/finder templates)
Tree Jack Study

Original charter circa late 2017

Why are we doing this?

We launched "Laddawn.com 2.0" nearly 3 years ago. The centerpiece of the new site was the widget. It was a great leap forward, but the consensus amongst us seems to be that it is straining under the growth of our product offerings. For example, when we add new products with special characteristics (like lip & tape) or provenance (HACCP), we're hamstrung by the widget's layout, logic and structure. Rather than accommodate a new set of input fields, we've had to stuff things like different lip sizes or the HACCP-designation into the poly bag menu - causing it to become quite bloated and unfriendly. There are a host of other usability issues which we will enumerate below or on other pages as we proceed with brainstorming.

Goals

Awesomeness - provide product finding and product discovery tools (tools that make our offerings immediately known), that customers and employees love to use every day. Employees talk about them with great passion and pride and rarely if ever feel the need to apologize for them.

Increase sales, through more quoting, finding and feature adoption.

Guiding principles

What do we need to preserve? What are our assumptions?

Our diversity of product offerings and our customization capabilities (materials & additives, printing, venting, film color and packaging) should remain exposed or be easily discoverable - we want a clean design, but not so minimalist that our capabilities are concealed.
Users should still not have to distinguish between stock and MOD.
Speed is paramount.

Process

Discovery and data analysis

Analysis of all current "product finding" strategies (widget usage v. search box v. retrieval of saved items v. reprice, etc.) ( Monique Plourde (Unlicensed) )

Validate and refine product information architecture with internal and external users - using card sort method ( Jason Burke, Susan Parker (Unlicensed) )

Competitive research - research and present out other e-commerce sites that are offering the ability to configure an end result and balancing that with ability to quickly find common, standard offerings (Derek McMahon, Susan Parker (Unlicensed), Jason Burke - and anyone else who wishes to participate in this)

Brainstorm which existing features work well and which don't. One session held with core team; more to come with CE, CR and IT.

Brainstorm wish list of enhancements and features - for example:

Comprehensive bag designer - see your bag as you build it
Show pictures and drawings with every result?
Incorporate additional dimensions - lip, bottom gusset, etc. to support new Marketplace categories.
Suppress dimensions that are not applicable (v. keeping visible but disabled - e.g. depth when looking at layflats).
Address disjointedness of keyword/item # search (in banner) being coupled with mandatory zip code (in widget)? Is this a problem?
Streamline the way high level categories are coupled with their sub-menus. (Blow up the menus?)
Address in-house made NS quoting?
Better presentation of pricing in results.
Provide better landing spots for marketing and promotions.

Develop design concepts

Preliminary concepts and options - review with IT and senior stakeholders.

Develop prototypes, test with users, rapidly iterate - review with IT and senior stakeholders.