Customers are overwhelmed by all the products available across all five of Glen Dimplex Americas brands' e-commerce websites. With so many heating products, they can feel lost trying to find the right product. So, when the company was building their new D2C website to seamlessly connect all their brands' e-commerce websites together, it was clear that users would benefit from a tool to guide them to find a product that's right for them.
The plan was to create a step-by-step guided selling tool to help users find the right product across all five of Glen Dimplex Americas' brands.
To design a tool to guide users to a product to suit their needs, we first needed to discover what their needs were.
Using SEO tools like Moz and Google AdWords, we compiled questions and phrases that people search when looking for heating and fireplaces.
Doing this exercise, we learned that people mainly search for fireplaces and heaters based off their appearance, as opposed to functionality. Therefore, to generate accurate product recommendations for our users, the questions in our guided selling tool had to focus on the product appearance.
As UX designers, we don’t know much about heating products. So we interviewed industry professionals at Glen Dimplex Americas who have been immersed in the field for years.
We spoke with a:
The first step was to understand the products we would be recommending so the tool could give accurate recommendations. We organized the products into categories with a makeshift visual tagging system. This helped us learn benefit-related questions we could include in the tool, and how we could lead users down a path to a handful of products.
We created a user flow of the different paths users could go through. It outlined the questions that would be asked, the answers users could choose from, and their corresponding product recommendations.
We made sure that we asked appearance-related questions as early on as possible. Though some functionality questions were necessary at the beginning of the quiz to narrow down the product recommendations, the focus of this iteration was very much on the look and style of the products. Modern or traditional? Mantel or wood oven? Portrait or landscape?
A usability test of ten participants from Canada and USA proved we were on the right track with our questions. Users liked:
However, the main complaint this iteration was the final recommendations page. There were a variety of frustrations, such as:
We began work on our second iteration, making the appropriate changes based on our testing insights. The final recommendations page was the primary focus, of course, and we added more specs and product recommendations. Everything was starting to come together.
However, we ran into an obstacle. After presenting our most recent iteration to the development team, we learned that they would not be able to combine all five brands into one tool. Instead, each brand would need its own guided selling tool.
Luckily, the questions and flow we had created could be used for most of the brands, with some tweaks. But now, with a fast-approaching deadline, we had to create new flow charts for each brand.
We modified our original flow to create two brand flows: one for Dimplex, and one for Faber, as shown below. The number of questions for each brand was significantly cut down to cater to each brand's product selection.
We converted our original Figma prototype into two separate prototypes, making one for each brand.
We organized our Figma document before sending them to the development team for hand-off.
