Project:
Docking Station Finder
Location & Date:
Plugable - Redmond, WA
Winter 2021
Role:
UX Researcher
Interaction Designer
Visual Designer
Many individuals look for products to extend their workspace. The most common scenario is finding a product that connects their laptop to multiple monitors, memory devices, and more. With laptops losing ports, and as technology constantly changes it becomes difficult for the average person to find the right product that is compatible for their laptop. Once customers purchase the wrong product it then leads to frustration of having to return the product or even it ending up in landfill. Non-tech savvy customers need an efficient way to confidently find a Plugable product to avoid the hassle of future returns.
Laying the groundwork
With that, it’s important to understand the industry's best practices on relative tools on product finders or the like. I had first conducted a competitor research with similar companies to see if and how they have executed similar solutions. I looked at our direct (Kensington) as well as our indirect competitors (Amazon, NewEgg,...). Asking questions such as, “How is this product succeeding?,” “How might these solutions be improved?”
Overall, there were a few common themes that I found:
The data for these product finder tools were connected to a dataset already in place on their website.
There were short simplified steps and support contact information.
They had definitions for all the technical terms for the different ports that laptops offered along with a reference image.
To help drive the process, it's crucial to also understand the constraints and to analyze existing tools in place. We needed to decide what information the customer should input for the “computer” to output the right recommended product(s). We also noted that recategorizing and reiterating the many types of combinations with our 120+ products would take a MILLION years. We needed to get a tool of our own out there to quickly learn and test.
We first recognized that we needed the customer to identify their laptop port along with their additional needs. We also recognized that utilizing the existing products page data and filter set was the best route.
Sketch & Test
Given all the information, I was able to develop the first few mockups of this Plugable product finder. Before sending off to the developers, I decided to conduct a few different scenarios to ensure we were making data-driven design decisions. We conducted the following samples using PickFu.com.
You are a customer trying to find a docking station that connects to your Thunderbolt™ 3 macbook laptop. Follow the links to the prototype for each scenario and decide which case version for each scenario is best…
Questions on one page VS separate pages
Definitions listed at the bottom of the page VS display definitions on a hover (Modal)
Additional options disabled VS Additional options hidden
After these tests and analyzing the results, we refined mockups accordingly then passed them to the developers to create a live version on our website. This would include aligning the tool to our visuals and the product page data set.
The product was coming to life. I repeat…TO LIFE!
We conducted one last internal test for quality assurance and made adjustments accordingly. Then passed to our CEO for one final approval and then came launch day…
We just needed a name. We had some pretty interesting names but the ‘Docking Station Finder’ just stuck.
Results
About a month later (March 2021), we found out that the Docking Station Finder tool was one of our Top 10 most visited pages on our site. In one of the weeks alone we reach 2,046 page views with direct links - which means people were finding us on Google!
Do you need to extend your workspace but don’t know where to start? Visit the Docking Station Finder Tool here.