Role
As a UX Designer on the Domain.com team for Endurance Group, I was responsible for leading research and design activities to help our small business audience purchase a domain, create websites, and manage it all in our self-serve platform. Once a year, Endurance held Innojam, a week-long sprint to gather teams, identify complex problems, and create innovative solutions to present to the wider organization. Grand prize winners and runner ups would have the opportunity to explore their solutions further and build them.
Challenge
The theme for this InnoJam was "Robot Rock", encouraging teams to solve real-world, customer-facing issues through machine learning, AI, automation, and other related means. With this in mind, I wanted to see how we could leverage AI to solve for a problem in my team's space: lack of website and e-commerce creation. There was a growing number of customers who only purchase a domain name and don't do anything with it. I saw an opportunity to help convert these domains into fully-functional websites, shops, etc. in a seamless, (almost) hands-free manner.
Process
As a one-man team, I immediately set to work speaking with customers to understand their reasoning and pain points with converting domains to websites. Then brainstormed ideas by crafting user flows, mind maps, and eventually rapid prototyping concepts to test with and deliver to the InnoJam panel for assesment.
Goal
Design a seamless domain purchasing experience that encourages customers to create and launch a website through AI.
Timeline
1 Week, October 2019
"The fact that it's AI powered and can find what I need is so much easier. I would use that and the price seems very reasonable if it's doing all of the work for me."
User review
Discovery
Gather Feedback
Before designing, I needed to know our customers' behaviors, reasons, and pain points into purchasing a domain and creating a website or e-commerce platform with it. After interviewing 3 of our customers and pulling data from our domain purchasing flow, I compiled these insights:
- 20% of customers that purchase a domain just hold it or don't plan on making it into a website
- Customers are unsure if their domain, idea, or business will succeed, so they refrain from spending more money
- Customers get lost, overwhelmed, or bombarded with too many different options to build a website
- A third of customers feel the need to turn their domain into a website right after purchasing
- Customer noted that it's too difficult to build a website, citing they don't know how to code
Goals
With this and the theme of our InnoJam in mind, I crafted a design goal: Design a seamless domain purchasing experience that encourages customers to create and launch a website through AI.
Ideation
Mind Mapping
With an understanding of our customers and their behaviors, I did some more digging into what newer customers find most valuable with their domain name or website. Then I drafted a quick mind map to help visualize what the most important themes were:
- Availability: Is my domain/idea actually available on the market?
- Value: How much would my domain/idea be worth once its a website?
- Findability: How easy is it to find my domain/idea through Google, Yahoo, etc?
- Perception: What does my domain/idea look like come to life?
User Flows
I then created some quick user flow diagrams to understand what this domain-to-website purchase flow could look like for customers, and all the various options, use cases, etc. involved.
To encapsulate this, I drafted a user needs statement: As a new customer, I need to quickly establish and secure my domain name, and setup my website, so that I can increase engagement with my business/brand and gain more customers.
User flow diagrams.
Prototyping
Wireframes and Concepts
With only a couple days left, I immediately jumped into creating rough sketches and wireframes of this domain-to-website experience. Along the way, I established some design principles to help guide the work:
- Chunking: With so many different options and paths to take, only present the most crucial information to the user at an approrpiate time and within a logical order
- Delightful: Showcase the power of AI by automating arduous, complicated tasks that exceed users' expectations
- Control: Don't force users into situations they're not comfortable or familiar in and allow them to freely pick and choose, backtrack, etc. at their convenience
High Fidelity Prototypes and Flows
I then translated the wireframes into high fidelity click-through prototypes in Adobe XD, circled back with some partners for internal reviews, and prepared them for 2 rounds of user testing.
View Prototype
High fidelity prototypes and versions.
User Testing and Iterationss
Usability Testing
After creating a prototype, I sent them to 5 customers for usability testing. Findings:
- All customer found it easy to navigate and the design was "clean" and "professional"
- Most wanted additional pricing informaiton, itemization, details, etc.
- Most were surprised to see website creation options but appreciated that they were "right in reach"
- Some were confused by the call-to-actions and content around creating and launching a website
- User Index Score: 3.7/5
Iteration
With only a day left, I focused on addressing the feedback with my next iteration:
- Make call-to-actions more clear around what the user will do exactly
- Display a price breakdown/list instead of just the subtotal and total
- Include more information on the variety of website building and enhancing services
The Outcome
After identifying and solving user problems in design time and testing, I submitted my project to the InnoJam panel. A couple weeks later, I found out it won grand prize! This felt like a huge accomplishment for me given the amount of teams that participated and the quality of work submitted. Ultimately, we forked this work into a related project that was eventually built and improved domain-to-website conversion rates for our customers.
View Prototype
