The problem is discovery, not capability
Customers wanted to personalize, but often didn't know where a feature lived, or that it existed at all.
01 — Problem
Powerful features customers couldn't find
70+
personalization features, spread across different corners of the admin.
Configured Commerce gave B2B sellers more than 70 ways to tailor the buying experience, but there was no single place to find them. A feature customers can't find is a feature they don't use.
Goal
Make personalization easy to discover and easy to act on, so any team can tailor its storefront without needing a dedicated marketing department.
02 — Research
Customers didn't know what they already had
I interviewed members of our Client Advisory Board (CAB) about how they find and use personalization. Three themes came up again and again.
Support was covering for the gap
Personalization drove frequent support tickets, and the help docs were hard to find and interpret. That costs clients and our support team time, and it doesn't scale.
They wanted guidance, not just tools
Most CAB members asked for help deciding what to personalize to stand out, especially mid-market teams with enterprise demands and small staffs.
03 — Shared goals
Three goals, agreed on together
I brought the research into a whiteboard session with product and engineering stakeholders so we could agree on what the Personalization Center had to do before anyone designed a screen. Each goal links directly to a part of the final design:
- Consolidate all 70+ features in one place → the Features page.
- Show performance so teams can make informed decisions → analytics on Get Started.
- Guide creation instead of leaving users to figure it out → Goals and the setup wizard.
04 — Key design decisions
Organized around outcomes, not features
Start with the business goal
Customers think "I want fewer abandoned carts," not "I need the Offer Promotion feature." So the entry page leads with goals. Each one recommends a feature and opens a wizard that walks through setup.
The tabs follow the same idea: Conversions, Product Discoverability, Customer Engagement and Sales, with relevant metrics shown next to the goals they relate to.
One home for every feature
For users who already know what they want, the Features page lists all 70+ features grouped into familiar areas: Catalog, Promotions, Content, Search, and Shipping & Fulfillment.
Every feature gets a one-line, plain-language description of what it does for the buyer, so the page also serves as a way to discover features.
Show what's already running
Customers had no single view of the personalizations they'd already set up. Existing Personalizations lists them all, filterable by feature type, customer segment and date, with favorites pinned to the top.
Bring segments next to the features that use them
Almost every personalization targets a customer segment, so I moved Customer Segments into the Personalization Center instead of leaving it in a separate area. Moving it has a cost for long-time users, and that trade-off came up in testing.
05 — Iteration
From wireframe to hi-fi
I kept the wireframes rough so we could change them quickly, and reviewed each round live with internal stakeholders and CAB members. Across those rounds, the landing page changed in three ways:
- Tabs changed from feature types to outcomes. "Pricing based / Product based / Customer based" became Conversions, Discoverability, Engagement and Sales. The feature-type groupings moved to the Features page.
- Text prompts became Goal cards you can act on. Each goal now carries a suggested feature and a wizard to set it up.
- Placeholder metrics became real analytics, with comparisons to the previous period, so teams can see whether a change worked.
06 — Validation
30 customers rated every page
I shared the hi-fi prototype with 30 CAB members. They rated each page on desirability and perceived value, and told us why.
Desirability uses our UX team's internal 0–100 likeability score, which shows how much someone would want to use the page. Perceived value was rated separately.
Get Started
Desirability72/100
Customers liked the page, but worried that the Goals might be too generic for their particular business.
Features
Desirability78/100
Met expectations by putting every feature in one place. Some asked for better organization within the list.
Existing Personalizations
Desirability81/100
The highest score. It met a need customers hadn't been able to cover before, helping small teams keep track of their campaigns.
Customer Segments
Desirability70/100
The move made sense to customers, but they warned it could confuse long-time users.
In their words
[Is this where] you can improve your goals based on your site and metrics? If so, I think this would be great to add.
It appears to be a way to view and track current personalization tactics… which would also be fantastic!
What the feedback pointed to
Make Goals fit each business, add structure to the features list, and help long-time users find features that moved.
07 — Outcome & takeaways
Validated, but never shipped
The Personalization Center didn't ship before my role was eliminated in a company layoff. It was still a complete, customer-validated concept: research, wireframes, a hi-fi prototype, and desirability results from 30 CAB members.
What I'd do next
- Let teams adjust Goals to their own business metrics.
- Add search, filters and grouping within the Features list.
- Add redirects and in-app hints from old locations, so long-time users don't get lost.
- Measure success by changes in support tickets and how many features customers use.
Design for the outcome customers want
- Lead with goals, not feature names. The biggest change came from organizing around what customers want to achieve instead of how the product is built.
- Moving features has a cost. Consolidating helps new users and disrupts long-time ones. Plan the transition as carefully as the new home.
- Talk to customers early and often. Unlike on earlier teams, I was in regular contact with real customers, so problems surfaced in wireframes instead of after launch.
Next project — 03
Vendor Managed Inventory →