Dell

Servers Learn and Browse Product Journey Redesign

The previous version of the servers learn and browse experience put heavy focus on shopping by connecting the user to the server products almost immediately in the journey. The goal of a redesign was to provide a less "shop" focused experience and a more integrated, solution-centric discovery and learn experience for large enterprise customers.

Live Product View

Deliverables

Figma files of e2e learn and browse journey pages (4 templates), Figma files of new design system MFEs (3 modules), research share-out, content platform migration, e2e journey site map, problem statement and goal map

Core Team

Design Lead (me), Design Intern, Development Lead, Content Strategist, Product Manager

Background

Business Goal

Stakeholders had a vision of driving offline users online to learn more about server products and Dell's holistic server solutions:

  1. The separate shop and learn into distinct, separate paths

  2. Deprioritize the shop path and prioritize and guide more users down the learn and browse funnel

  3. Migrate the current experience to the new content platform to avoid information loss and decline in engagement

User Needs

Users cared a lot about information architecture and the mental model we were creating in how we grouped our products:

  • Classify servers specifically by workload, with call outs to performance to help target their solution requirements at a high level

  • Highlight product features and customization options to avoid deep diving too early in their discovery phase

  • Build awareness and transparency of services and support to build confidence

Outcomes Overview

Challenges

Framing proved to be the most challenging part of the process, as this is where the most misalignment and churn occurred between the team and our stakeholders. I continued to stay agile, perform additional research, and bring data into the conversation to help all roles make informed, confident decisions.

Reframing debates by tying back our original business and user goals was key in unblocking the team, and by keeping our strategy and MVP requirements at the forefront, I was able to continue moving us forward at points when the team got stuck in the details.

Successes

In the short 6 months that the site has been live, it looks evident that the redesigned servers journey is performing significantly better in many areas, and overall, driving more traffic and keeping users inside the journey:

  • the total revenue per visit has drastically improved by 50%

  • for unpaid traffic, total organic search has increased by 43%, and referred search by 9%

  • for paid, traffic from affiliates has grown 6% and from banners 2%

  • forms and chat has seen grown of over 25%

  • bounce rate has decreased by 15%

Design Process

Scoping and alignment between the team and our stakeholders was critical, as other designers had failed to deliver on this work multiple times due to misalignment and lack of communication. My other focuses were on building rapport and transparent conversations during the research phase, maintaining a continuous feedback loop by providing visibility to stakeholders through framing, and steering discussion outcomes according to business and user goals.

Research

The research efforts for this project were extensive and multiple methods were used:

  • Quantitative live data analysis; this indicated an overall low engagement and a lack of discoverability

  • Examination of prior research initiatives to uncover what content resonated with users and how to stay relevant to their mindsets

  • Exploration and analysis of the competitive landscape

  • Audit of the current Dell servers learn experience

  • Journey mapping of online and offline experience to expose gaps

  • Establishment of performance and design baselines to track success and indicate when future change would be needed

Ideation

Deriving various design directions for organizing server content was important, as the various cross-functional teams each had a different idea of what the taxonomy should be. I worked with simple flow diagrams as the earliest forms of framing.

We churned so much during ideation and direction alignment that I pivoted and facilitated a card sorting session. I included all key stakeholders and SMEs to determine what types of information would be needed and how it should be classified and organized. I also ran a smaller, unmoderated card sorting test to get a rapid user perspective.

Framing

Despite the size of this project, I collected a requirements list to ensure specific needs were concise. This also allowed preexisting technical limitations to be exposed early on. Following card sorting, priority mapping was done and wireframes were created to give stakeholders a tangible representation of the design direction.

After overcoming additional misalignment, mockups were created for each page in the journey, providing stakeholders confidence and clarity of progress. MFEs were reused in multiple areas to reduce unnecessary effort, and several new modules were created to satisfy requirements not met by preexisting components. The creation of new MFEs added to the design system to reduce future debt and accelerate future development.

Testing

We did larger groups of unmoderated testing to gather feedback on mental model and taxonomy, new module design, and the overall storytelling of each page.

Additionally, we brought the designs to larger team and department reviews to receive continued feedback and provide visibility.

Strategic Takeaways

This project saw multiple strategic initiatives to pursue a long-term company vision and a future direction. Continued success in the infrastructure space is key part of Dell’s business model and creating an experience that matches the rest of the modernized product journeys was imperative to continue driving online learning and purchasing presence. Modernizing also gives us the opportunity to enhance self serve options within the journey and sets the stage for engaging AI moments. Additionally, having cross-product consistency allows changes to be made across all journeys more confidently and rapidly; this promotes acceleration of innovation.

Impact

The true success of this work was aligning a diverse group of stakeholders and team leads, and delivering a scalable, user-centered experience that better supported our enterprise customers' learn and discovery needs. By anchoring our decisions in both business and user goals, we created an framework with a quality consistency and experience integration that is inline with other Dell infrastructure journeys, and can be built upon long-term.