Templatizing the search experience
Overview & key contributions
Led an initiative to restructure results pages based on customer intent research and merchandising opportunities.
Project details
Role
Lead UX content designer
Team
Product design, search engineering, merchandising, product management
Responsibilities
Information architecture, wireframing, testing copy
Opportunity
The HEB research team had just completed a study on customer search intent, looking closely at the different objectives a customer may have when coming to the H-E-B website to search. At the same time, H-E-B's data science team had just run an analysis to group search terms into different intent buckets to better understand customers' shopping missions.
The next phase of the work would be to gain insight into a user's openness to supporting content based on the specificity of their search term, with the ultimate goal of creating templates based on the discoverability of a search query.
To help us understand the future of the search results page (SRP), we set up a series of user tests where we got customer feedback on design concepts with different layouts to determine the right balance of results and additional content.
Goals
For our users:
Provide relevant, sponsored and merchandised, products and savings within our Search experiences to help them discover more products more easily
Avoid disrupting customers goals (get out of their way!)
For the business:
Increase profitability
Create an experience that can scale to support algorithms and segmentation
Assure we are creating solutions that will work holistically with all our digital experiences
Increase H-E-B Retail Media (ads) inventory in search
My approach
1
Map intents to existing components and ideate new components
Lorem ipsum
2
Run workshops to get merchandising and marketing stakeholder buy-in
Lorem ipsum
3
Get the templates in front of users (testing time!)
33 participants, both H-E-B customers and those who haven't shopped H-E-B
12 templates shown to participants: 3 templates per search term specificity plus current state of search
Showed both web and mobile templates
Takeaways:
Netural-to-positive sentiment no increasing the amount of content from specific to broad templates
No significant difference in users' preferences from mobile to web
Key findings were divided into two buckets:
Component insights: feedback on how customers interacted with a specific component type, agnostic of which query type they were observing
Structural insights: feedback on order and volume of components for a specific query type
4
Document template and selling strategy recommendations for merchandising
Used testing insights to influence roadmap decisions about what components we'd prioritize building in the future
Results & impact
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec vel enim dolor. Praesent vulputate nunc sit amet finibus eleifend. Praesent auctor, dui sit amet sollicitudin aliquet, felis risus pharetra magna, nec lobortis dui massa id purus. Phasellus quis turpis libero. Pellentesque consectetur urna finibus, placerat augue eu, sollicitudin metus.