RevolutionParts
RevolutionParts helps dealerships thrive in a highly competitive online market by dramatically streamlining the work involved with running an online automotive parts business. One of their core beliefs is to provide partners with the right set of integrated tools that will cut down on unnecessary and tedious back-office work, manual data entry and reentry, and allow our partners to focus on growing online parts sales.
Responsive Website template
To help customers quickly and efficiently create and update their eCommerce websites my team designed templates to give customers a starting point. My team perpetually generated new template concepts based on customer analytics to give users a simple and straightforward shopping experience. I collaborated with my team to create a responsive template design that became a template option that customers could purchase from RevolutionParts. Based on the performance of older templates I designed a template that is easy to customize, promoted our successful widgets, and helped give users an intuitive shopping experience.
Problem Summary
RevolutionParts works with many automobile brands and hundreds of car dealerships so it is important that my team design website templates that are easily customizable to meet each customer's needs. Automobile brands can have different looks and feels and a website that compliments a rugged and industrial brand may not work with a refined luxury vehicle brand. With this in mind I needed to create a design that could work with a large array of automobile brands. I also had to consider that there were over twenty website templates preexisting template templates and I was tasked with creating a template that unique to the templates that came before it. Additionally, customer feedback dictated that the new template should bring more attention to the vehicle picker widget. The vehicle picker widget is a standard widget on RevolutionParts websites that allows the end users to input their car information to see auto parts that work for their specific vehicle. This widget is tremendously helpful in refining the end user's search for parts that will for for them but the widget is often overlooked. I needed to create a design that better promoted the vehicle picker widget for the end user's browsing experience.
Project Goal
My goal was to create a new template that curated content in a unique way, is compatible with most auto brands, and promoted the vehicle picker widget.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Our primary audience are car dealers and auto makers who buy website templates from RevolutionParts and our secondary audience are end users who shop on the websites for car parts and accessories.
Research
Gathering feedback about the performance of preexisting templates is a collaborative effort between the Sales team and the Design team. Members of the Sales team speak regularly with customers about template features they like and areas in which the templates could improve. This feedback is relayed to the design team to help us better understand and anticipate the customers' needs when conceiving and designing new templates. My team also used Hotjar to analyze the performance of website templates. Screen capture recordings of users interacting with customer websites, conversion tunnels, heat maps, helped my team evaluate the performance of website templates and gave my team valuable insight into how each template met or fell short of the customer's needs. From conversations with customers and our Hotjar observations it was apparent that the customers wanted the vehicle picker widget to be more prominent and that the end users were not engaging with the widget at a desired rate.
Sketches
We drew sketches on a whiteboard as a team to think through some layout ideas for the new template. I refined some of the ideas by sketching wireframes on paper.
Wireframes
Using Adobe XD I created low fidelity wireframes based on my sketches. After a round of edits with my team I created high fidelity wireframes in Photoshop. These helped give the rest of my team and other teams within RevolutionParts an idea of how new template would look.
Prototype
Some of the designers on my team are also very talented developers and were able to translate my high fidelity wireframes into a functioning website using RevolutionPart's content management system within a few days. We then shared the website with other teams within RevolutionParts for feedback. When all parties were satisfied with the template's designed we conducted a limited release of the template with select customers.
Final Product
After we received customer feedback and adjustments were made the template was added to RevolutionPart's store. Data from customer interviews, heat maps, and site visit recordings showed that this template's new vehicle picker design and attracted more attention and encouraged users to interact with it at a higher rate. My team was also successfully able to help each car dealership that purchased the template customize their site for the auto brands they represented.
