Dell is a computer hardware company in the United States employing more than 165,000 people worldwide. Dell develops, produces, supports and sells a wide variety of personal computers, servers, notebooks, storage devices, network switches, PDAs, software, peripherals and more.
Discover is a micro front-end that exists on Dell's e-commerce servers page and serves to facilitate the search for server solutions that meet different needs. In late 2022, we decided to redesign some parts of the server purchase journey in Dell e-commerce. Our goal was to improve and make easier the journey to find servers across different industries and user cases.
The approach
We had a multi-national team dedicated to this project. The team responsible for this project consisted of a product manager, two developers and a product designer (me 😎). We had 2 months to go through the entire design and validation process.
Problems
First, we encountered several conversion problems in Discover MFE. Of the amount of people accessing the servers page of Dell's website, a small portion would go down to Discover MFE, click on the link to expand, and click on some option for more information.
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If 100 people are on the page
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17 people are seeing the MFE
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And only 1 is clicking
This was the old MFE.
Business Goal
We set some assumptions about the old MFE:
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Users think that the MFE is an advertising banner, since all other components of the page are advertising banners.
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Users do not understand that the MFE is clickable.
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Users don't consider the MFE eye-catching because of the content.
From this we would like the MFE to be eye-catching enough and to stand out on the Dell Servers page. We want the conversion to increase a lot and more people to click on the "Shop Now" and "Learn More" buttons in stage 2 of the Discover MFE.
UI/UX Design
We drafted many ideas for the new MFE. We validated the ideas in review dynamics with other designers in the team, collected feedback from business stakeholders, and refined the designs.
We prioritized the redesign of the first stage of the MFE, because we intend to work on the redesign of stage 2 later on. We have adapted the content of the MFE and inserted the verb "Explore" to encourage user action. We also deleted the old stage 2 of the MFE to reduce the number of clicks needed to get to stage 3. And we also brought the buttons from the old stage 2 to stage 1 of this MFE, in order to improve the component's affordance.
Usability Testing
We tested the old MFE and the proposal we designed. We used UserTesting.com and did unmoderated testing with 20 people. At the end of the tests, we noticed that the redesign proposal did much better than the old MFE. Users were able to use it more easily, and were able to find the MFE on the page more quickly.
Results
As a result, we built and launched the new Discover MFE in 2 months with an amazing distributed team, and the remote work also can be efficient and can lead to good results. Since the product has only recently been released on Dell's website, we don't yet have metrics to prove that we have improved the customer's product discovery journey. I plan to update this case when we have those metrics in hand.