Knoll - Product Configurator
In 2012, the famed furniture manufacturer Knoll was up to its neck in digital problems. Despite most of the information and functionality being similar, they had upwards of seven websites for different divisions and customer bases. Each site experience was completely different from the next, leading to disjointed and confusion problems for existing customers..
At CTG, I was the lead & sole designer on taking all of those websites and trying to figure out how to consolidate them all without aliening any of their customers.
“Romance” or “History” content was highly variable across their products - the tabbed story module meant that we could have as much content around a product as we needed without it impacting conversion or product exploration.
The Problem
Knoll's product variance is relatively high—some products have decades of history and romance, others are hyper-configurable, to say nothing of products in adjacent industries like textiles.
We needed to support several product detail pages in one e-commerce platform, but we needed to maintain consistency and affordances across all of them without diluting their differing purposes.
The Design
First, we didn't worry about 'the fold' - we knew we had much content, and in 2012 (we elected not to go responsive as it was new at the time), monitor sizes were quite variable.
We used different selectors for different product options so they were easily identified when juxtaposed at the top of the PDP. Pricing changes due to other options were explicit about how much they would affect the price. After modifying an option, the price would animate to the new value—this way, it was more evident to the user that something was happening to the cost.
We prioritized content critical to the purchase process. We moved modules for product stories into a tabbed accordion so that they could be easily added/removed without a major impact on the interface.
A common complaint with furniture buying in 2012 was not knowing the dimensions or they would be tucked away out of view. We brought the front and center and made them easy to decipher.
The Results
Upwards of 5 different PDPs were developed and built for their platform, and sales increased both for individual products, but with cross buying as well (my fabric selection for a chair may inspire me to get textiles for curtains, for example).
