HOW MIGHT YOU INCREASE $52.9M IN REVENUE BY ITERATING
Wayfair | Strategy | UX
Why was Wayfair’s search results page converting customers at a low rate? I led my team of designers and uncovered that customers could not find what they’re looking for. Using competitive analysis, I prioritized findings and partnered with the product manager on a key hypothesis: What if customers could choose results by category?
I explored new designs. While the first iterations did not perform well, I continually learned and tweaked until we got to a win of $11M revenue. The team and I iterated again and again, leading to another $7.4M and $24M of revenue. In total, this project resulted in a win of over $51.4M for Wayfair and helped customers get to their products faster.
My Role
I led a team of 5 product designers. As a team lead, I led strategy and prioritization discussions with the product manager. As a manager, I partnered with two designers on this project. I also delivered my own research and designs as an individual contributor.
STRATEGY & DISCOVERY
User research, competitive analysis
Wayfair’s old search results page featured a main grid of products with two main features above the grid: A list of links called “suggested departments” and a group of filters (rectangular drop-down boxes).
My product manager and I had a hunch that features above the grid might be confusing. But before jumping in, I convinced the product manager to prioritize discovery to make sure we’re solving the right problem.
I conducted exploratory user research with five participants. I discovered that Wayfair provides too many irrelevant results (like a white couch when you’re searching for green). At the same time, participants want to be inspired and explore more. Lastly — and this confirmed the initial hunch — no one noticed the features above the grid.
I partnered with a junior designer for the competitive analysis. I coached him to consider and draw inspiration from websites beyond e-commerce. Ultimately, we analyzed 10 websites and discovered different themes to help customers, such as grouping by categories and showing what other customers bought. We also analyzed how those themes were located on different areas of the page.
STRATEGY & DISCOVERY RESULTS
There are many opportunities to improve the search results page and help customers get to what they love faster. Given technical constraints, I advocated for allowing customers to narrow down results by categories as an MVP (minimum viable product). This functionality would put us on par with competitors and what customers expect.
DESIGN
Interaction design, live A/B testing, iterate again
Narrowing down by categories requires both the right design and the right content. But is it the content that customers are not resonating with? The design? Both? I first focused on the design.
ITERATION 1
Working with the engineering and analytics teams, I live A/B tested three MVP variations where I changed the UI. I explored text links, pills, and copy changes. We then measured the add to cart (ATC) rate, which is a proxy for conversion (whether a customer bought that product). More than 2.4 million customers saw these designs.
Unfortunately, none of the UI changes increased ATC rate.
I hypothesized that the area above the grid is likely still too cluttered, and customers weren’t seeing the categories.
ITERATION 2
Back to the drawing board for iteration 2. Looking at the competitive analysis again, many competitors used categories as a filter. New hypothesis: Maybe Wayfair’s design is too “out there”? Maybe we should stick with categories as a filter, a paradigm that customers understand? I iterated on that idea.
I again worked with the engineering and analytics teams and launched a second, live A/B test. Over 2 million customers saw these design variations: One with a category filter and another with category buttons. I also put in a third variation with no visible filters to see whether it was actually the filters that caught customers’ attention.
The variation with the category filter won on both desktop and mobile! There was 2.33% increase in add to cart rate and a 0.39% decrease in bounce rate. This resulted in an $11 million increase in revenue. The category filter design was rolled out to the site!
ITERATION 3
We’re never done! On to the next iteration.
Building off of the win with the category filters, I worked with engineering to increase the number of categories to 20. In both design variations, the first 6 categories are the winning ones from Iteration #2. The second design variation has an extra search bar to search for categories. This iteration #3 was also a live A/B test where 25 million people saw the designs.
Variation 2 with the search bar was the winner across both desktop and mobile! There was 0.30% increase in add to cart rate, 0.57% increase in conversion, and 0.11% decrease in bounce rate. This resulted in a $7.4 million increase in revenue.
ITERATION 4
About 9 months later, a second designer on my team and I designed a fourth iteration. During this time, the website had changed and the filters have moved to the left. With this change, we iterated on where and how to present the filters.
The design we went with placed the categories above the filters. Moreover, the mental model is now a category tree instead of category filters. A “tree” allowed customers more pathways to find what they’re looking for.
Iteration 4 was a huge success and resulted in an increase of $24 million in revenue! This design was rolled out to all 14 variations of the product listing pages and across all of Wayfair’s four other brands.
And the wins keep coming! About 6 months later, this design was tested on other pages with a grid, like the search results page. It was also a win, and that generated $10.5 million in revenue.
The total: $11M + $7.4M + $24M + $10.5M = $52.9M in revenue!
Results
Each iteration may seem small. But the combined effects of iterating can result to huge revenue gains. This project identified a key opportunity of allowing customers to choose categories. Through learning each time, the four iterations resulted in a total of $52.9 million increased revenue for Wayfair.