Project Goal

Create a best-in-class experience for customizing a range of products on Wayfair. We needed a flexible feature that would provide customers with a visually engaging way to customize upholstered products and dynamically view a rendering in real time. For the MVP, we would test sofa classes with an average of 5 custom options and ~65 fabric options.

Key Decision: What constitutes a custom product?

Product, Design and Engineering collaborated to define a threshold based on number of visual options (e.g. fabric color, leg finish) and non-visual options (eg. size, cushion filling) to determine which products would adopt our new UX/UI.

 

Usability Testing with Wayfair Customers

I conducted usability testing with high-fidelity prototypes and iterated on the designs from session-to-session. The study revealed that users, once they had decided on a particular body fabric, had a hard time finding that same fabric to apply to other customizable options. To mitigate this, I introduced a way to surface the selected body fabric across the different customizable options.

Solution & Final Designs

Product Page

We needed to add a way to view custom options from the product page. The ability to customize was kept separate from the ready-to-ship options. To show all the ways the customer could customize, we surfaced the different options such as body fabric and throw pillow fabric on the product detail page.

 
wcu_2.jpeg
 
 

Full-screen view for customizing

Given that we wanted to scale this feature to accommodate 10+ custom options in the future, we decided on a full screen experience. This real estate allowed us flexibility for adding additional options and created an immersive customer experience that would showcase the dynamic imagery being built on the engineering side.

 
1_k2gopuPBrcPTwc_N4J8UfA.jpeg
 
wcu_3.jpeg
 
 

New Components

For this project, I proposed, designed and led implementation of several new components for Wayfair’s design system, Homebase.

 
 
 

Release & Next Steps

This project was hugely successful and increased Add to Cart for Wayfair Custom Upholstery products. After its release, we expanded the UI to more product classes with multiple product options. We also continued to expand Wayfair’s Custom Upholstery program by experimenting with ways to increase swatch orders and thereby driving more custom upholstery orders.