The Newegg homepage is designed to make your shopping experience easy.
Ross Higgins leads Newegg’s global design and user experience efforts. He and his team define the way you interact with our web, mobile and app user interfaces. Nobody (and I do mean nobody) at Newegg is a bigger advocate for improving your shopping experience than he is.
Higgins believes our website should have a user-centric design that employs modern techniques for data analysis and user testing. This approach has led to many web site improvements for a better shopping experience. I recently sat down with him and found out what makes him tick.
Meet Ross Higgins
Why do you care about user experience so much and how long have you been a designer?
I built my first professional website in 1996. I am a firm believer in form following function. It doesn’t matter how nice something looks visually. If it isn’t first functional, then it’s not solving the problem. I believe everyone is entitled to a good experience and it’s my responsibility to deliver that best experience.
How long have you been working at Newegg and what problems did you find on the website?
I’ve been working at Newegg for three years now. There have been many improvements to the website we have tackled. We created a rich mobile experience for phone users. We completely redesigned the checkout process and developed a guest checkout option. The one I am most proud of was the overhaul to the faceted navigation. This is the filtering tools on the left side of the webpage allowing shoppers to narrow search results and find just the products you want.
How did you fix these problems and what obstacles did you face?
A large part of the upgrade was allowing multiple selections within a filter group. Previously, you could only choose one per group and that was just too limiting. We also added the selected filters to the top of the search results in a graphical manner to make it easier to see what filters have been applied and easily remove them without having to hunt for them in the left side column. There were many more updates we rolled in during this project and you can see more of them in this NeweggTV video.
What improvements are you currently working on and what can we expect to see in the future?
We are constantly updating the experience for our customers. We have just launched a new version of our iPhone app with many UX improvements based upon customer feedback and extensive user testing. We are also working on a complete redesign and upgrade to our wishlist feature.
What advice do you have for others beginning a career as a designer?
Design these days has many disciplines ranging from industrial design, to print design, to visual design, to UI and UX design and more. I think it’s important you expose yourself to them all and find what you are good at and what you enjoy. Hopefully they are the same.
As you can see, our UX director loves making your shopping experience easier. If you’re curious about his methods and didn’t catch his inspiring presentation at the IRCE Focus on Digital Design conference, you’ll just have to keep refreshing your browser to see what he’s up to at the moment.
