Tuft & Needle Product Description Page

How a four-week redesign of a single page could get $10.4 million in revenue

My role: User Research Manager

Team makeup: Research + Product Management (me), Research Intern, UX Designer, Copywriter, Project Manager, Software Engineers

What I did: Established UX Benchmarking to get a baseline usability score across TuftAndNeedle.com, led Research Intern and UX Designers through Exploratory, Generative and Evaluative research phases, set direction of experiment roadmap

Mobile and Desktop views of a Tuft & Needle Mattress Product Description Page

Background

Tuft & Needle invented the Bed In a Box mattress in 2013. Since then, lots of competition has emerged. A brand that started as a leader began needing to play catch up.

Tuft and Needle’s first bed in the box mattress and their fierce, cutthroat competition

In response, the business aimed to rebrand and reposition ourselves up and a way from the competition. The goal of the rebrand was to encourage our user base to “trade up” and to target new user segments that shop premium products. However, they didn’t know what customers thought about our current experience or how to manifest a more premium offering on our site. That’s where User Research came in.

Goals

• Increase conversion rate of our premium mattresses (currently 1.21%) to match that of our basic mattress (1.47%) through repeat purchase or new user acquisition.
• Increase usability score of our PDP by 5%.

Research roadmap

We needed to conduct Discovery to establish business goals, evaluate the current customer journey and define content strategy. From there, we leveraged Participatory Design to develop solutions, validate and prioritize.

Discovery takeaways

1) Users consider information on comfort and firmness to be most important when considering purchasing a mattress. However, from an ease of use perspective, we score low the ability for them to find this information.

We run UX Benchmarking twice a year to identify where we fall short compared to competitors from a usability standpoint.

Card sorting helped us identify the relative importance of PDP content.

2) Users believe out mattress is “safe” and “green” because external sources give positive reviews. There’s an opportunity to play up non-toxic, environmentally friendly aspects on TN.com as we dive more into wellness space.

We interviewed Tuft & Needle customers to identify the steps they were taking on their mattress journey, the information they sought, their attitudes and pain points. Safety and health being one of them.

Evaluation Takeaways

1. We conducted a participatory workshop where users could build their own PDPs with pre-designed modules.

2) The framing of our on-page mattress upgrades is not compelling because users prefer benefit driven terms over internal/industry verbiage.
E.g. pressure-relief, comfort, firmness, vs adaptive foam, mint layer, ceramic cooling gel.

Prototype testing identified specific feedback on how users perceived the authenticity of our content.

Outcomes

1. Explaining comfort and firmness through richer storytelling imagery and video
2. Moving away from “walls of text” to an eye-catching, icon approach for communicating crucial pieces of content
3. Positioning upgrades as relevant outcomes for the user

Following validation of the solution, we will break down designs into testable solutions. We leverage a revenue algorithm to prioritize which features would make the biggest impact. We estimate that the PDP redesign will result in $10.4M increase in annualized revenue.

Left: snippets of our revenue generator algorithm. Right: Graph of predicted revenue (blue) vs actual (green)

Process Screenshots

Screener survey to identify ideal research participants

Cross functional brainstorm with MURAL

Sensemaking user interviews with MURAL