BEST BUY INTERNSHIP
UX DESIGN
This past summer, I had the opportunity to work as a UX Design intern for Best Buy at their headquarters in Richfield, MN. I was a part of the customer solutions team and able to work on a number of projects for both their full and mobile website. Here I've showcased part one of the projects that I worked on.
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TECH HELP REDESIGN
BRIEF: BestBuy.com hosts a number of editorial content pages called "Tech Help", that serve to inform users of different products and product categories and how they fit into their lives. As they exist right now, though, these pages are problematic in that they are inconsistent, hard to find, and most importantly they don't retain users - the majority of users that enter these pages leave the website altogether. Best Buy hoped to solve these problems and enhance the overall user experience by redesigning the pages completely. The objective was to create a modular page template that could host the wide variety of products that BestBuy carries - the template was to be created entirely out of established components (widgets) so these pages could be quickly constructed and implemented in the future without leveraging more engineering or UX resources.
ROLE: My role as the UX designer for this project was to analyze the data given to me by my product manager, and in conjunction with the engineering constraints set for the project, create a modular UI that could efficiently host all types of product categories and improve the experience for both the users as well as the business teams that publish the page.
RESEARCH: I started this project with research. This meant looking at the site's user data and analyzing when and why the users were leaving. Additionally, we did an analysis of competitor's pages to get an understanding of different interface elements that were being used elsewhere. Our main takeaways were; 1) our pages were not offering effective lateral movement to related products and page and 2) we weren't giving our users enough actionable context about the products.
IDEATION: Once I understood the user's difficulties, as well as some benchmarks of how our competitors were tackling these problems, I began to ideate on possible solutions through quick and high-level wireframing. Ideating like this allowed me to come up with a large quantity of ideas in a short amount of time. Once the wireframes were complete, I populated them with the existing page content and interacted with them within InVision. This allowed me to think critically about what features presented appropriate page hierarchy. Below is an example of how this process appeared visually through three different wireframes.
REFINEMENT: After I had created a number of wireframes, I had people interact with the inVision prototypes to gain insight into what widgets and configurations were most effectively presenting users information. Once this information was collected, I was able to refine the concepts into final prototypes - taking the most successful pieces from each concept and seeing how they could work together within one wireframe. While the data I gathered from testing was useful, sometimes there wasn't a clear winner and I had to make decisions myself about what would be best for the user. I've included an example below.
All of the Tech Help pages that currently exist and that would eventually populate these designs had corresponding products that we wanted users to have access to - two widgets that offered this were the button widget (top left) and the carousel widget (top right). They both performed well when tested, so I had to think critically about what the actual differences in function were. I ended up deciding on the carousel because it gives users immediate benchmarks surrounding pricing, general user satisfaction, and what the products look like all without having to leave the page, whereas the button widget forced users to bounce back and forth between pages. This is an example of where use cases had to be defined, though, as not all pages had broad enough product categories to populate multiple product carousels. In this instance, we decided that one carousel would be placed at the top of the page, and to increase visibility to secondary or tertiary product categories we could use the list widget (bottom left) from the A wireframe, and place them above the learn widget (bottom right) in the B wireframe.Decisions like these were made surrounding every widget within this redesign, and we ended up with four different core templates for different kinds of content, each with multiple different use cases and caveats for when to implement different widgets. An example of one of the existing pages on mobile compared to how it will exist under this redesign can be seen below.
Once the template had been finalized for mobile, it was easy to translate the design to the full site. Below is an example of a different page as it exists right now on the full site, and how it will exist under this redesign.
After the final templates were completed, they were handed off to our marketing and digital content teams to be used when new pages were necessary. At this point in the project, I was directed to redesign the category pages that would eventually lead to these Tech Help pages. Best Buy wanted a page to host all of these articles, and category pages nested within that page so that users could easily navigate from the global home page to an article that would help them. I followed the same process of research, ideation and refinement to create these pages. Unfortunately, I cannot post the final design until the page goes live, but some of my early wireframes are visible below.
