Helping customers decide which grill to buy
Strategy
UX
UI
2 Developers
1 Lead Developer
1 Director of Digital Platforms
OVERVIEW
Traeger grills are an expensive purchase. Selecting one grill that will have the right features and price can be overwhelming. This project focused on identifying opportunities to help our users pick a grill, starting with a quick quiz to give an initial recommendation and then providing opportunities for further research.
What grill features are important to our customers?
We started this project with a survey to find out how our current grill owners select their own grill. We wanted to understand what questions do they ask when recommending a grill to their friends and family. I was inspired by the survey results and the differences between what our customers value in their grill vs what they think others should consider before purchase. This gave us a lot of ideas for questions we should test to replicate the experience of asking a friend for a grill recommendation on Traeger website.
Mapping out questions and recommended grills
What is the least amount of questions we can ask before giving a good recommendation? I was able to narrow it down to four key questions, focused on portability (once you decide you would like to take your grill on trips, it really narrows down the grill selection to pick from), grill size, and the budget. I used the initial set of questions to explore different ideas on how we could present the grill recommendation tool. After evaluating the prototypes with the team, I narrowed it down to two versions for user testing.
Version 1 - step by step approach
First version I tested was a step by step quiz. This approach helped our users focus on one question at the time. I added a progress bar on top of the quiz, to set expectations for the amount of questions. This version performed well, however users expected they had to answer every question to get to the recommendation.
Version 2 - one page quiz
This version performed well, but it was clear for our uses that they do not have to answer all of the questions to get to the recommendation. We chose this version, while making sure we will keep the number of questions small.
Grill recommendation & user feedback
Once a user goes through the quiz, I decided to show more than one grill recommendation. When testing this page, participants appreciated having more than one option - in case the main grill recommendation was too expensive. As the grill recommendation tool is treated as the first step in customer’s research, it is important to provide links encouraging further exploration - in this case a full grill comparison and a recommendation on what accessories to purchase with the selected grill. In the initial test I decided to not include ‘add to cart’ CTAs in each grill recommendation, assuming that it is too early to push someone to purchase. However, the test results highlighted that having no ‘add to cart’ present, even if someone is not ready to buy, will make them assume the grill is not available to purchase online.
Further research: Grill Comparison
I included an abbreviated view of the Grill Comparison (with recommended grills preselected) at the bottom of the Grill Recommendation page. The new full grill Comparison design replaced the pdf that we had on the website, making comparing grills easier.
Bundles: know which accessories to get
Once someone knows which grill to get, we should make it as easy as possible to get the right accessories. This is how the idea for bundles was born, letting our users purchase a grill with all the right accessories carefully selected by our team.
After exploring different ideas, we decided to start with this simple option, letting user select their grill and have just one bundle per grill instead of multiple options.
Final Design
The final grill recommendation tool has all of the questions on one page, to give our users a chance to skip questions they do not want to answer. We will test different question combinations, but we will always make sure to keep the number of questions small to avoid overwhelming our users. Grill recommendation result page includes further opportunities to learn about your perfect grill choice, such as grill comparison and bundles.
