When the team at Bluebeam that managed the ecommerce platform came to me asking if I’d be willing to help with design I jumped at the opportunity. The platform was the most basic, straight out of the box, design at the time. It was a major point of friction for our customers as our product was fairly complex and we asked customers to retain a lot of context to avoid making mistakes.

We started out with redesigning the store by prototyping and user testing to refine the prototype. We wanted to create an experience that really helped answer questions along the purchase path instead of relying on users finding tertiary pages of the site to answer those questions. So we worked closely with sales and operations to understand what type of questions customers would have at each phase of their decision and integrated those into the prototype.

We launched this redesign alongside our main marketing site redesign. From that point on we iterated heavily on the store resulting in revenue gains of 20-30% year over year.

My Involvement

• UI/UX Design
• User Flows
• A/B Testing
• Usability Testing & Research
  
• Front End Development
  
• Roadmap Development

Andrew's work has been instrumental in contributing to a whopping 52% increase in North American ecomm transactions and 38% increase in North American ecomm revenue year to date.

Kristine Willis, VP of Bluebeam Marketing

Optimization and Testing

We heavily utilized A/B testing and surveys as our tools to iterate on the store. Using applications like Visual Web Optimizer and Hotjar I was able to make changes on the front end of the store with no development effort expended testing out ideas in a rapid fashion.

Testing this way gave us a way to protect from good intentions as well as build trust with stakeholders. Even most well intended designs sometimes have unforeseeable consequences on key metrics. We wanted to make sure we weren’t making those mistakes, as well as learn about how our changes were impacting the users.

Over years we rolled out dozens of tests, some found success immediately and others took a few iterations to find success. With every test we learned a little more about how our site visitors thought about the product and what would convince them to purchase.

Integrating Licensing

Our flagship product being a per device license had some built-in challenges for folk’s mental models about how software should work. This challenge really came into play when it came to upgrading to the latest version, paying to add more users or even simply understanding what you own currently.

An integration between licensing and ecommerce seemed very obvious from an outside perspective. We frequently saw this request directly from customers in our post-purchase survey. The connecting the two was not an easy journey. It involved cross functional groups from both licensing and ecommerce teams coming together to help the other deliver this experience and connecting a home grown licensing system with legacy architecture to new platforms.

With a lot of work for both teams we were able to create a front end that would display licenses and give contextual actions you could take on each license. You no longer had to look up your maintenance dates to know if your license was eligible for a free upgrade or not, we just show you if it is or isn’t. You no longer have dig through old emails to find your license certificate that may be years old at this point, if you own it we show it to you on the interface.

Not only was this a positive change for the customer it was a sigh of relief for our operations team members. Previously it was very easy for a customer to place an order for a product that they simply couldn’t buy at the time. With this change the system wouldn’t allow users to purchase products that they didn’t have a license eligible to utilize so operations no longer had to deal with those back and forth from misguided customers.

Results

Over the years I oversaw the design of ecommerce for over seven different language. I achieved incredible results with optimization and testing, reaching nearly 40% growth year over year. Beyond numbers I helped push the ease of purchase to the next level with the licensing integration, making product purchase requirements transparent and obvious. Ecommerce in the company has grown from an afterthought to a shining example of how to exceed expectations.

Left: Inital store front design. Right: Today's global store front.

Let's make great experiences together

Pasadena, California
andrew.richardson.j@gmail.com
@AndrewR_Design

© Andrew Richardson 2021