Design for the millions
At Wayfair, we love our millions of users. We want to give them the best possible online experience. And we have millions of products that we want to showcase to them!
My design team focuses on five primary areas: main navigation, homepage, category pages, account pages, and shops. This is where we get the widest range of customers and where we have the widest range of content to pick from.
Part of my role as an experience designer at Wayfair is to build a bridge between two worlds: make Millions of People meet Millions of Products. All while fulfilling our mission: Make shopping for your home a fun experience, and not a source of anxiety.
One way we’re addressing this is by focusing on how we can better welcome and guide customers across our site. How do we manage to create an experience that flows for everyone? And how can we build something that can work within the current Wayfair technologies and systems?
In short: how do we design for scale at Wayfair?
Here are 3 rules to get started that don’t add to your design process. They might even make it faster!
Rule #1: Don’t design alone
In the past, designers would tackle a project on their own and bring an idea back to their product partners. They would create a beautiful experience, validated by other designers. But sometimes, the design would end up being impossible to build.
Something that is going to make the page load slower? Forget it. Something that looks beautiful but buries products? Absolutely not. Something that has a very friendly dynamic text? Forget it.
When designing at this scale, we realized that effortless design could have fewer chances of translating into easy engineering work.
So together, with our product partners, we started to do things differently.
Now, we get together with a product manager, and one or two tech leads to define what we can or cannot do. And as soon as we start narrowing down on a user problem, we go on and brainstorm as a full team.
Frontend, Fullstack, Backend, Data Science, PMs, and QA are all involved. We take an hour to chat and consider scaling constraints from the start.
The meeting provides an opportunity to discuss many potential solutions, and collaborate with tech experts. And it checks the scalability of a solution on 2 aspects:
- It brings more mindsets, so we get to see how different people think or appreciate a potential solution.
- It brings multiple expertise from a technical standpoint. We attack the problem from all the angles.
Also, bonus point: It’s a great team building activity and gets people excited about the problem we’re solving!
Rule #2: Open up the feedback, check your data, bring in the numbers
Did you know something as small as changing the header color can cost your business? When we changed the Wayfair header to purple we saw a decrease in our core business metrics. At this scale, even the tiniest change can have a significant impact.
We recently decided to improve the visual hierarchy of our header. During the ideation process, I offered one concept that had a purple background. The team was excited about it because we believed it’d be a great way to reinforce our brand, make the header distinct, and greater emphasize the page content and product imagery.
We were fortunate that during one of our design reviews, one PM remembered about a past test where a similar concept was presented to our customers. It had failed.
We have multiple ways to make sure we leverage our prior knowledge. We involve our amazing data scientists colleagues as much as possible. They help us make decisions every step of the process. But we also bring multiple PMs into our design reviews, so we can leverage their expertise and institutional knowledge.
Rule #3: Know your technology, befriend your system
To help our customers find the right products for their home, we need to come up with simple ways to browse our catalog. Finding products when you face a product catalog with millions of possibilities is overwhelming.
On the other hand, manually curating the Wayfair catalog, is simply impossible.
When creating a new concept, we have to be smart about what technology our site is currently using. And ask ourselves:
“How can we leverage the technology in new ways?”
We recently worked on the launch of a new flagship brand on Wayfair, a brand that is all about colors. In our initial brainstorms with the core team, we started to think about a “shop by color” component. How could we show multiple products but allow customers to quickly see different colors? The way we have done it in the past is by having somebody manually find products of the same colors, create a list, put that list in the database, and connect it to the live component. This is very hard to scale.
So we started to think: What if we could use our filters instead and automatically show a subset of products filtered by color?
And this is how we created a simple component that would show 6 products of the same color, using the filter technology in the background. And with just a click, customers can switch between 6 different colors to see what are the most loved products of the same color. It looks great!
Because of the way we built it, that component is fully scalable to our entire catalog. It could be a “Shop by Brand”, a “Shop by Material”, a “Shop by Price”, pretty much anything that you can find within our current filters!
In conclusion, by bringing more functions in the design process, making sure we gather learnings at scale and understand how to leverage our technologies differently, we are finding innovative ways to make the shopping experience fun and easy.
By keeping the scale at the core of our design process, we can create solutions that will work for the masses and adapt to all the use cases. All while having more fun as a team!
If you are in a company that has millions of users, here is what you could be doing right now:
- Rule #1 Take 30 minutes with your PM, engineer, data scientist to brainstorm on your current project.
- Rule #2 Review the different concepts with people who have experience within your company, as well as different areas of expertise.
- Rule #3 Grab coffee with a few engineers and talk about the technology that actually powers your experiences, and how you can use it to better personalize them.
And ask them, could I use that technology elsewhere?…
Thank you Connor Doherty for your help!
