ViSenze

Equipping retailers with fully customisable widgets to fit their brand

My role

Lead designer, responsible for:

  • UX Design

  • UI Design

  • Design System

The team

  • Diogo, Head of Product

  • Ankita, PM

  • Leonard, PM

  • Liubo, Tech Lead

  • Rachel, Engineer

  • Seerong, Engineer

  • Wilson, Engineer

  • Praveen, QA

Business impact

  • Increased adoption of Recommendations strategies by 20%

  • Reduced tech support time by 90%

ViSenze helps retailers make their products more discoverable with Visual AI.

One of their solutions is the various Recommendations strategies that retailers can publish on their websites via ViSenze’s carousel widget.

Visually similar

Model outfit

ViSenze’s carousel widget for different Recommendations strategies

Their latest Recommendation strategies have low adoption rates as they don’t come with accompanying widgets.

Customers can only publish these new experiences via API and SDK, which requires a lot of time and effort to implement.

Gallery

Outfit inspirations

ViSenze’s latest Recommendation strategies require widget layouts more complex than a regular carousel

The lack of accompanying widgets is due to challenges with the existing widget framework:

Lack of widget layouts

The only available widget layout is an in-page carousel, which is not suitable for the experiences powered by the new strategies.

Time-consuming development

Creating each new widget layout requires coding components and configurations from scratch. This is time-consuming and unscalable.

Limited styling options

Widget configurations are not versatile enough to fit customers’ branding. Application Engineers have to spend additional hours on custom requests.

How might we build a scalable, flexible widget framework that quickly generates diverse layout options to boost strategy adoption?

Hi, Wig!

Meet Wig — a way to style widgets easily for any look.

The solution is a widget component library built upon the atomic design framework. Wig is tailored for versatility and scalability.

Before

Widget layout is hardcoded with limited configurability. Building new layouts requires starting each one from scratch.

After

Widget templates are composed of customisable Wig components. Assembling new layouts is quicker with reusable blocks.

Efficient and scalable

Reusable components speed up development, allow easy scaling, and ensures consistency

10X more layout options

Variety of widget layouts to cover a range of strategy use cases

Flexible for any brand

Customisable to fit any brand's e-commerce design guidelines

HMW empower users to customise widget templates independently, reducing the need for custom engineering support?

Users have varying levels of technical expertise.

01

Beginner

Business owners or digital merchandisers with low or no technical expertise.

No-code GUI

02

Intermediate

Solution engineers or product managers adept at HTML, CSS, JS, and JSON.

Code editor

03

Expert

Full-time software engineers with comprehensive programming knowledge.

Their own IDEs

What’s the ideal tool for styling Wig widgets?

Which proficiency level should we prioritise?

Should the tool be as easy to use as hair rollers, as advanced as a curling iron, or as technical as a digital perm machine?

Initial direction

We aimed to launch a widget for the new Gallery strategy to secure a deal. Success meant one Gallery layout along with a beginner-friendly GUI.

New direction

A new business goal then prompted a pivot to quickly enable more strategy use cases instead. Success now meant more widget layouts and a code editor for intermediate users.

Here’s the code editor that was shipped.

A demo of me creating an out-of-the-box widget for an Outfit Suggestion strategy

Solution Engineers were trained to customise the widgets themselves.

Ankita (PM), Rachel (Project tech lead), and I conducted training sessions and ‘Bring Your Own Experiences’ workshops to educate SEs and collect usage feedback.

Solution Engineers using the code editor to create and style Wig widgets in line with customers’ branding

20%

increased

adoption

90%

reduced

tech support

The addition of more widget layouts resulted in a 20% increase in Recommendation strategy adoption.


The widget builder also allowed SEs to style widgets independently, reducing Application Engineers' support time by 90%.

Do reach out if you’d like to find out...

What decisions and tradeoffs I made to get to the final design

What challenges I faced and how I overcame them

How I collaborated with my cross-functional team mates

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