As the full-time on-staff Senior User Experience Architect, I was responsible for the customer experience, visual design, information architecture, workflows, and requirements documents for a number of web and mobile projects.
An avid photographer and long time customer of B&H, I catered my designs for a visual audience of peers whose time is short and want clean, quick interfaces that allow them to find what they are looking for and purchase.
Mobile Site
I designed the mobile site to work on Safari on the iPhone, Android browser, Blackberry, and the emerging tablets. These are stripped down yet highly functional mobile versions of not only the mobile apps but the desktop site itself.
Wishlist
Adding an item to a wishlist used to be a rather painful experience. You clicked the “Add to Wishlist” button, which took you off the page you were on. You were then asked you to add or create a new wishlist, and then were taken to a confirmation page. To get back to where you were took 3-4 clicks of the back button.
I redesigned the entire process from scratch. Now, if you were on a product listing page or product detail page, you can add items to a wishlist or several wishlists, create new wishlists, and even move items in between them.
Because this was such a cool and easy way to add items to a Wishlist, why not also make it work for the cart? It wasn’t hard at all to redesign the add-to-cart process at the launch. It’s the same process and UI elements. When this went live, responded with overwhelming approval. B&H is now tied for first place as the most “easy-to-use” online retailer.
iPhone App
Designed over the summer of 2009, I wanted the B&H iPhone app to be simple, clean, and fast. As an avid photographer and gear guru myself, I designed an experience that I thought catered to pros, but also provided valuable information, reviews, and resources for just about anyone. The competition wasn’t doing a very good job with their apps; I thought them clunky, slow, and it took a long time to get to where I wanted to go.
The “killer idea” I had for this was realizing that photographers are always on the go. Other than maybe airline pilots, who else travels more? And what happens if you lose or don’t bring your manual with you? Today’s new gadgets are more complex than ever. So I designed in a feature to allow customers to download manuals for over 3,000 items right to their phone, over-the-air (even 3G). It saves the PDF to the phone, so to read the manual, you don’t need connection!
Please enjoy a quick walk-through video of the app.
Affiliate Platform
B&H needed a robust, scalable affiliate platform for our affiliate partners, who earn up to 4% commission per sale. We have tens of thousands of affiliates and pay out millions in commission each month. We use a 3rd party system that wasn’t working as well as we’d like. So we decided to create a new platform ourselves. I worked closely with the Affiliate Manager, Yoni Yudin, who came up with a few ideas for widgets and concepts which I then designed (including the workflow process) from scratch. We started with low-fidelity wireframes so our developers could get their heads wrapped around the concepts, and conclude if they were doable, and then I completed hi-fidelity mockups, workflows, etc. The widget/banner creator example is shown.
Wedding & Gift Registry
I pitched B&H that the time had come to start a Wedding & Gift Registry. People love gadgets and electronics now more than ever, and several couples I knew had asked me whether B&H had a wedding registry.
Starting with looking at established registries at Macy’s, REI, and others, I set out to create a very easy process for which you were able to add product to your registry very quickly. While these early mockups show the need to add a before and after wedding shipping address, I eventually eliminated that as a requirement for registration. So, if you were an existing B&H customer, all you needed to do to get started was:
1. Name your wedding registry
2. Select the date of your wedding (or in the case of other events, the respective date)
That’s it.
The rest – things like shipping addresses, co-registrants, etc. can be done before you publish the registry. People love adding items to their registry and I wanted to show that you could get started very quickly. You might not really know where things are shipping just yet so you can figure that out later after you’ve had fun adding items to your registry.
I think it’s one of the fastest registry setups on the internet. Here are some screenshots, in no particular order.
