Nikki Solemsaas UX Portfolio Various work

Desktop QA&s – UI redesign

During my on boarding of the Customer Q&A’s space, I discovered that the current ‘instant answers’ search experience lacked consistency in its UI. After analyzing the search results on the Desktop widget, I discovered that there were no less than eleven different font types. In discussions with the development team, I found out this was because the team had built a piece meal feature as requirements arose. Because they didn’t have a designer at the time, the UI was overlooked.

With the “Before” state of desktop search in disarray, I worked to clean up the UI. And although a desktop redesign was nowhere on the roadmap, I pushed my team to immediately implement UI changes. I made the case that since no backend work needed to be done, taking a few weeks to clean up our space could make an impact on how users viewed our feature (aesthetically if something looks “nice”, users assume it works well too).

My first step in the process was establishing a hierarchy. Because this lived in Customer Questions, I reintroduced full word labels back into the space. While my team stated that with the import of reviews stars into the results, we no longer needed an additional label for reviews, I pushed back. I stated that in the case of consistency, without a reviews label the alignment would break the grid that I had established for Q&As results. With these full word labels we also solved any issues in translations for other locales, because some other countries do no use similar acronyms to Q&A.

IMPACT:

Reduced dev work due by utilizing most of the existing grid the team had already coded
After I identified that the desktop experience had UI inconsistencies with font sizes, colors, and alignment I was able to convince my team to prioritize a complete overhaul. I redesigned the feature to have consistent typography and link behaviors. My updated design is cleaner, more unified and much easier to parse.
Over the course of the six months after desktop redesign, the instant answer catch rate (usage) rose almost 20% in the US and has also shown consistent growth in other locales as well. Concluded increase correlated to redesign as no other changes were made to desktop during this time

BEFORE REDESIGN

AFTER REDESIGN

Amazon Customer Q&As – Mobile Search & Post

While the Ask team had established the ability to search within Q&As and Reviews on Desktop, we had yet to implement the same behavior on Mobile devices. Users were limited to manually searching for matching queries they may have had by scrolling through dozens sometimes hundreds of Q&As and Reviews. On a mobile device, that was a very cumbersome task. To start, I established with my team that we needed to give customers the ability to search Q&As & Reviews within the Customer Questions widget and to elevate matching queries from already existing customer content.

Working within the limitations of the Q&A widget, I explored concepts that would be able to display results that were discernible and easy to parse within the detail page. One of the first concepts we tested revolved around bucketing results into their various info types. I worked with a design technologist to create a prototype with multiple treatments. I also worked with a user researcher to discuss what kind of information we wanted to attain from the study. My initial research yielded no similar platforms to compare with, so from the study I sought info on what customers found confusing by way of segregated info types. I was hoping this would give me insight on where to go directionally. During usability, we discovered that customers had no problem parsing result types whether they were bucketed or not. Existing callouts such as “Q” & “A” and review labels contributed to the info type recognition. We also observed that customers found a one line preview with a matching query was sufficient to get the user to progressively expand the result to read more. A combination of the expandable arrows and ellipses were enough to indicate a longer search result had been truncated.

IMPACT:

With my new designs, the Ask team was able to reduce the redundancy of questions being asked and elevate the multiple answers that have already been written. In addition, I gave customers the ability to post questions directly on the detail page and for the first time gave users the ability to post directly from mobile devices.

From a customer email to Jeff Bezos: “Hey Jeff, I just wanted to let you know that as a customer Amazon answers is an amazing feature. We had a question on a food processor and posted a question which was answered in 30 mins. I didn’t expect a reply that soon! This really helped us make a decision. Please keep innovating.”

Able to elevate multiple answers already written
Surpassed STeam goal for 2015 to provide immediate answers to customers when the content is already available, which helped us to answer customer questions instantly and avoided soliciting customers when answers already existed.
Our goal was to have 30% of questions successfully answered instantly by EOY. In December WW 50.56% of questions were answered instantly. Over 2015, we saw phenomenal usage and impact from our search feature.
Launched Post Questions and Instant Answers on Mobile in US in August 2015 and saw a large uptick in customer engagement on Mobile in the US: