Lowe’s Website Re-Design

Over the course of two weeks, I worked on re-designing Lowe’s website . The first week, I worked with a partner to conduct research on the existing website as well as Lowe’s competitors. The second week, I synthesized the research and designed and tested two iterations on the website design.
Initially, I was tasked with solving the following problem:
In an ever-changing retail landscape dominated by e-commerce, how can Lowe’s maintain its competitive edge ?
Based on feature prioritization that had already been performed, I knew that my design would need to:
- Have clear ways of locating specific products
- Allow users to purchase products efficiently
- Steer customers toward popular products
User Research

To get to know Lowe’s customers, we first conducted contextual inquiries at a Lowe’s location in Gowanus, Brooklyn. We tagged along with four customers as they shopped, yielding some of the most important insights of this project. While the customers ranged from a couple simply browsing without the intention of buying anything to a contractor who planned to return to Lowe’s the very next day, they overwhelmingly had the following behaviors in common: they were visual shoppers who navigated by looking at products, not signs; they wanted to see and inspect the physical product before buying it; they enjoyed browsing, even if they brought a shopping list; and they were frustrated by the lack of help they received at the store.

Next we conducted card sorts in order to get a sense of how users would mentally organize the products that Lowe’s carries (symbolized by a 100-item inventory). We conducted two open card sorts, in which participants were asked to create their own categories, followed by two closed sorts, where users were given categories resulting from the first two sorts and encouraged to add new categories as they saw fit. I further refined the categories following the closed card sorts, then conducted one final card sort to validate the categories. Overall, the card sorts did not reveal any clear consensus on how users organize the products, likely owing in part to a general lack of knowledge about the products themselves. I was able to consolidate and clarify wording for a few categories, but I ended up with a list of categories very similar to that which Lowe’s already has. My most salient takeaway from the card sorting process was that most users lack the knowledge of the full breadth of Lowe’s offerings to be able to rely solely on verbal cues to navigate, and that greater context would need to be provided to help customers find what they need.
Finally, I conducted usability tests of the existing website, asking 5 participants to find a hammer and go through the full checkout process. While 3 of the 5 users simply used the search function and were able to complete the task reporting minor complaints about the site’s usability, users who attempted to purchase a hammer by navigating through the site’s department pages experienced significant frustration. One user clicked through three pages of categories and subcategories, each with a different layout, before arriving at a page of product listings. The user was most frustrated by the confusing category page layouts that prioritized shopping by brand over shopping by subcategory, making it difficult to find the information she actually needed.
Revised personas
We were provided with two personas, but they were from several years ago and needed to be updated. Based on the insights from our user research, we updated both personas to reflect the up-to-date Lowe’s customer. In particular, we revised our primary persona, Claire, to reflect a need for definitive product recommendations rather than a broad range of options due to her lack of experience with home improvement products.

Based on the revised personas, I arrived at a new problem statement:
How can we make the Lowe’s shopping experience more accessible to users with all levels of experience?
With this problem statement in mind, I set the following design goals: to clarify navigation, to have results delivered in a logical way, and to provide visual information for products that will help users find and make informed decisions when looking at products.
Design Iteration 1

The first change I made was to the home page and global navigation. I decluttered the home page by moving the departments menu to a fly-out in the top navigation bar, including a space in the fly-out for internal promotion, and streamlining the promotional images.
Another priority was solving the issue of confusing category pages. Layouts are highly inconsistent across pages, and there even exist two distinct and differently designed pages for nails, each of which can be accessed via a different link on the same page. I decided to combine elements from both of the pages. Since my primary persona, Claire, doesn’t know a lot about the products sold at Lowe’s she needs images to help her find what she needs, which was a huge priority in developing this redesign. I placed the photos of the categories on top, followed by a full listing of subcategories within the department.

User Testing and Design Iteration 2

I tested my first design iteration with 5 users, setting them each up in a scenario as the persona of Claire and asking them to find and buy nails. All 5 users were able to successfully complete the task, and the average rating for ease of use was 4.6/5. Although the users were successful in completing the task, they expressed confusion about the nomenclature of the category under which “Nails” fell — nobody knew what a “fastener” was, and users were only able to guess from the image of a nail that accompanied the category name (a problem, but also a validation of the use of images to provide context in my design). In response, I changed each instance of “fastener” in the navigation to “Nails, Screws, & Fasteners.” From a UI standpoint, users commented that they could not find the search bar and that the graphics seemed oversized, so I made some visual refinements and made the search bar larger.
Most significantly, although users found the nails they needed, they bypassed the visual categorization I created at the top of the page because they could not figure out what to do with it. I replaced the visual categorization with an interactive tool that displays an image of each type of nail, explains the uses of each, and allows users to jump to that category.

In addition to reporting that the images helped them navigate, users said that the page layouts were logical — “Everything is where it should be” — and easy to use, with one user even stating, “This looks easier than Home Depot!”
User Testing Round 2
I tested my second design iteration with 4 users, 3 of whom were able to complete the same task that I had presented to the first set of testers. All of the users wanted to look for nails in “building supplies” rather than “hardware,” and one stated that it would not occur to them to look for nails in “hardware.” Once users landed at the “hardware” page, they were able to successfully complete the task and found the task easy. On average, the users rated the ease of use at 4.375/5.
Design Iteration 2: Prototype
Next Steps
As I continue to refine my design, I will focus my efforts on developing a categorization system that will reduce confusion, refine the templates for the department, category, and subcategory pages so that they are optimized for each individual topic yet remain consistent across the website, and integrate the project guide features on the website with the e-commerce experience.
Reflection
Redesigning Lowe’s desktop experience was no small task, and much work remains ahead. Though the outcome of the initial user research and heuristic and competitive analyses seemed unclear at first, they yielded rich insights that will continue to inform decisions on this design throughout the life of the project.
