Modular Configurator
B2B desktop and mobile application that allows a user to combine compatible modular products to create personalised products, see then in real time and then purchase them
Team: Two UX/UI Designers, One User Researcher, Four Developers, One Project Manager and Three QA.
Role: Product Design Lead
Timeline: 9 weeks
Introduction
As the toolsets within 3D Cloud continue to expand, the maintenance of these tools has become increasingly demanding. After evaluating the product configurators, I identified several similarities and instances of component duplication. To address this, I proposed consolidating these tools into a unified, cohesive product that would maintain flexibility to support existing requirements while also enabling future technology integrations.
Goal
Consolidate all 3D Cloud product configurators into a single, unified interface that leverages the most effective features of each tool. This solution will offer a fully customizable experience, which can either be integrated into a customer's product pages or utilized as a standalone application.
Here is what I started with:
My Approach
Before starting any design work I had to first align my team with the Data BA’s to find out the feasability of combining all of the tools into a single data set. This task raised a point that the current process for onboarding a new customer is to have a Data BA maually enter lines into a spreadsheet and then set rules against each line to define what components combine to create a single product, these rules then extend to product and material combinations. This then led to a seperate project where we bilt an internal system that managed new data and allowed customers to set up configuration options themselves.
Once the product data was properly structured, we leveraged analytics to review each configurator tool, eliminating any unused or unnecessary functionality. This allowed us to create a single low-fidelity prototype, which was then presented to internal teams for stress testing to ensure it encompassed the full range of functionality from all previous tools.
After several iterations, the low-fidelity prototype was refined and prepared for external user testing. This phase allowed us to validate the tool's usability and ensure that it could be easily understood by new users before advancing to a higher fidelity version.
The improvements made to this tool resulted in a 60% reduction in production costs for new accounts, a 75% decrease in maintenance costs, and an average 2% increase in the "add to cart" rate across all clients.