Crutchfield case study

Crutchfield is a large consumer electronics retailer based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Rick led their design team which produced Crutchfield's award-winning e-commerce web site. Rick designed a product rating and review system which allowed customers and experts to add product reviews on Crutchfield.com.

While employed at Crutchfield as Website Design Manager, Rick was tasked with creating a customer rating and review interface for the Crutchfield e-commerce web site. The Crutchfield web site is known nationally for its in-depth product information, and the first proposal Rick made was to expand the scope of the project to include expert product reviews that Crutchfield writers produce for the web site. This allowed Crutchfield to display customer ratings and reviews as well as reviews from their product experts.

The system to collect customer ratings had been mostly coded by the IT team when Rick started the project, so he worked within a framework and functional specification that was already established.

One objective of the project was to bring a new interface design process to Crutchfield whereby designs are created in wireframe form, approved, and then explored visually. By creating a wireframe (a black-and-white line computer illustration of the site interface) before the visual design, management and the IT team could review the design to see if the functional specifications and objectives were met without the subjective and often distracting elements of shape and color.

After wireframes were approved, Rick developed the visual design, which was kept simple so visitors to the site would focus on the content of the review. Various screens were created, including the product listing page, product detail page, add a rating and review page, etc. Rick then worked closely with the IT developer to supply graphics and HTML assistance, and we worked together to test the interface to ensure it was rolled out in a form that exactly matched the design.

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