Salesforce
Salesforce
You're part of a the team at PacSun that runs their online store. You just got past the holidays and finally have a moment to breathe. Between new products, promos, and catalog updates you barely made it though this year. To top it all off, your CEO is talking about some Salesforce artificial intelligence feature that she wants on the site.
Great.
You indulge your CEO on a slow afternoon, and discover this thing recommends products to your customers automatically. It could save your team a ton a time but, it's really hard to understand.
Now what?
From the research sessions I conducted, we identified two main problems with the current experience.
Adding product recommendations to your online store is highly manual and technical process. Customers feel discouraged from trying them, missing out on the 7-16% sales lift they provide.
Recommendations are a black box. As a result, people expressed difficulty trusting an unknown algorithm to play such a large role on their site.
The following designs shipped publicly to everyone across the world.
We started where sellers already did most of their work, and introduced product recommendations to our website builder.
This update alone turned a difficult multi-week process in a simple click and drag experience.
We redesigned "rules" to help give people control over what products are displayed; allowing them to align to branding guidelines.
We also addressed the issue of trust, by surfacing analytics on how recommendations were actually performing. No more black box.
Over the next 6 months, our team saw objectively better usability scores.
- Adoption rate increased from 18% > 34%
- Average onboarding time decreased from 7 days > 1 day
One year later, product recommendations accounted for, 11% of all online orders submitted.
That's a growth of 25% in one year!