RTA Cabinet Store is a popular e-commerce site for kitchen and bathroom cabinets. While working full-time as a UX/UI designer at Renovation Brands, its parent company, I focused heavily on optimizing the RTA Cabinet Store website.
As part of this work, I conducted extensive discovery research to better understand the customer journey. This research revealed that product pages were a major source of customer frustration. I pitched a redesign to my manager, secured stakeholder approval, and led the project through design and launch.
I interviewed 6 of RTAâs kitchen designers / sales representatives to get their insights on our customers.
Listening in on customer calls revealed major points of customer confusion and the most commonly asked questions.
Analysis of competitor websites revealed helpful functionality that could be added.
Research revealed that customers had the following issues on RTAâs product pages.
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Trouble finding specific cabinets:
Customers have trouble locating the specific cabinet they are looking for on the product page because they have to manually search through 250 cabinet products on a single page. Trade Professional customers often have to use the command F key as the only way to find the products they are looking for.
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Important product info hidden:
Users often ask for key product information like whether a cabinet has soft close doors, dovetail drawers and what material it is made out of. Currently this information is hidden in large swaths of text and is hard to find.
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Need more specific dimension details & visuals:
Customers browse cabinets on RTA's website by looking at their visual wireframe dimensions. Questions about cabinet dimensions are some of the most commonly asked over the phone. RTA Cabinet Store needs to provide more specific details on dimensions for their cabinets.
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Price confusion:
Customers donât understand the base kitchen cabinet price. They think that they can get a whole kitchen for the listed price when really it's only a 10ft x10ft kitchen estimate.
A search bar and filters were added to make it easier for customers to search through and find specific cabinet variations.
View alternative design explorations
RTA consumers shop for cabinets by looking first at the visual line art dimensions rather than the product text. To improve their shopping experience, the layout was changed to make the visuals larger in the product results.
To make key information more findable, an extra âMaterialsâ section was added with icons for important product facts.
Customers often ask for detailed information about each cabinet that isnât currently provided on the cabinet listing. To address this problem, a more detailed modal for each cabinet variation was added.
To address customer confusion on the âStarting atâ price, an explanatory modal was added to the upper part of the page.
The initial A/B test of the new design was rolled out to 100%Â of users and split 50/50 between traffic. It resulted in a -9.90% lower product conversion rate and a -11.81% decrease in sample conversion rate. The test was ended after 7 days. To further refine the design, I analyzed our Google Analytics event tags on the page to make some changes.
The findings from the initial A/B test revealed issues with the design that were hurting a couple of our important KPIs (Sample sales + overall cabinet purchase rate). After the test launched IÂ jumped back in to the design to figure out what was going wrong and how to fix it.
A/B Test Data:
Google Analytics showed that there was a drop in clicks on the âStart Shopping Nowâ button on both desktop (â12.47%) & mobile (â14.55%) in new design.
Problem Hypothesis:
Changing the color of the button to blue and removing the down arrow caused users to overlook it and lowered the number of users navigating to the shopping section.
Solution:
Increasing the drop shadow under the button and adding a down arrow will help it draw more attention from users and get more clicks.
A/B Test Data:
Google Analytics showed that the number of clicks on the âAdd Sample to Cartâ button (located in the upper section of the page) stayed flat between the new and old design.
Problem Hypothesis:
Not including enough value proposition copy in this section (ex: Highlighting free shipping and refundable samples), reduced how persuasive it was and led to less users adding samples to their carts.
Solution:
Specify â100% Refundableâ and âFree Shippingâ in the text description.
A/B Test Data:
Clicks on the bottom âAdding sample to cartâ button dropped (â7.44%) between the new and old design.
Problem Hypothesis:
The new âAdd sample to cartâ button was the same color blue as the other call-to action buttons, which caused it to blend in.
Solution:
Create a new sticky nav bar at the top of the page with an âAdd Sample to Cartâ button.
Final results of A/B test after making design changes (12 days in):
Increase in product conversion rate: + 17.53%
Increase in sample conversion rate: + 43.37%
Decrease in product page exit rate: â 46.28%
After the final results came in stakeholders ended the test and approved rolling the new design out to 100% of users.
Learnings:
Search filters can be more easily looked over and forgotten about on mobile screens and must be given more prominence.
Things I would have done different:
For mobile screens, I would have placed the cabinet price above the product images. This placement would make it visible on all screens without needing to scroll.
Tradeoffs:
The short timeline and limited development capacity made it so I wasn't able to outline micro interactions on the page.
