Best Buy 3D Viewer

I led my UX/UI team in the research, strategy and design of the 3D Virtual Appliance viewer. The app helped increase conversions by 3 to 15% on these products and was a huge success for the vendors.

Role  –  Associate Creative Director, UX

UX Team  –  3 UX Designers

Mouse cursor over an info graphic on a 3d Samsung washer.
The problem

New models = sales lag

New models of applicances were experiencing an overall sales lag. A product manager came to my team with vendor funding looking for a way to showcase new appliances in some sort of 3D viewer. We spent several days hammering out a very preliminary feature set.

The preliminary feature set and KPIs in visual form.
The research

The journey map

What exactly is this app? What customer pain points are we trying to solve? My team talked to recent customers, identifying two main types with the higest purchase intent and mapped their journey. This was a huge help in answering the two questions above.

The purchase journey map for the 2 different types of customers.

The Research Findings

New features = the pain point

This was the main pain point we needed to focus on. Customers were confused by the new features / technology. What did they do? Advantages? They wanted to see, visualize it, see it in action.

Internal is home

Don't put the app anywhere but inside BestBuy.com. Customers never mentioned visiting a microsite, external vendor's site, etc during the buying process.

Yes, purchase intent went up

When customers actually interacted with the product in any fashion, their purchase intent went up. Especially when a floor associate was there to answer questions.

AHHHHHHHH, Stress relief

When we described the app to customers, they got very excited and stated strongly it would reduce a lot of the stress of paying extra for the latest models or just knowing what a features does.

Color...color...color

Over and over again customer mentioned the style and color were the most important options when buying a new appliance. We needed this for MVP, not all the other ideas.

Narrowing the feature set

After reviewing the research and journey map with the product manager, we worked with the stakeholders and dev team to narrow down the feature set to a manageable MVP.

The preliminary feature set with most of the options crossed off.
Testing and the final product

The uability testing

We did 4 rounds of usability testing. Users had a lot of problmes with the rotation, movement of the products. This was an essential feature, something we had to get correct.

Round 1

Round 1 design of the desktop and mobile versions of the app.

Round 2

Round 2 design of the desktop and mobile versions of the app.

Round 3

Round 3 design of the desktop and mobile versions of the app.

Final Design

The final design of the desktop and mobile versions of the app.

Getting the gestures correct

A user could pan, rotate and zoom the product and by round 4 found the app extremely easy to use.

The instructions for pan, rotate and zoom in the mobile version.
The mouseover icons for pan, rotate and zoom in the desktop version.
The Result

Launch and success

Customers loved the new 3D viewer. Post-launch customer feedback was very positive and the conversion rates and time spent in the app met or exceeded our KPIs.