Alex The Actualizer
Company
It's become easier than ever to create and customize printed circuit boards for hobbyists and company product deployments. However, there is no single place to shop, discuss, share, and create new exciting PCB products. Solder changes that. Enabling PCB creation at scale is the core of Solder’s innovative technology platform. By leveraging a global network of cutting-edge PCB manufacturing and material partners, Solder is becoming the leader in advanced printed circuit board solutions. More than just the Amazon for components, Solder offers a series of PCB design and manufacturing solutions for both hobbyists and commercial products. Founded in 2019, Solder is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California with manufacturing facilities in San Jose, the Netherlands, and Singapore maintaining a prominent global presence around the world… and we’re just getting started.
My Role
UX / UI Platform Designer
Skill Sets: E-commerce Design - Web Design - User Experience (UX) - User Interface (UI) - Content Strategy Support - Blog Writing
Designed 2018
Contribution
Before continuing, please understand I am routinely asked to “rip the label off” and share proprietary information with recruiters and HR professionals. My ethical standards do not permit me to do this, so I altered this project in order to showcase it on my portfolio. The stealth startup I have been working with to produce a similar product allowed me to make substantive changes to the work displayed here that fall within the guidelines of my NDA. That being said, Solder in and of itself is not a real website or platform but is a similar, yet sufficiently altered, idea that allows me to show off the work I produced.
In 2019, the founder of a stealth company came across a product I had designed titled Enemy Spawn. It was clear there was an alignment between his goals and my skills. I was offered a contract shortly thereafter and began designing their e-commerce website and proprietary software. When I was brought on, the client had a fledgling website created with an enterprise-level site builder that had a series of default templates built in. None of these templates were going to serve our long term needs, so I began redesigning the website in an application called Sketch. From there, I exported my designs to a host app called Zeplin and handed off my files to engineers that implemented the website.
The Big Idea
There is a huge community around printed circuit boards and single board computers. Some of this community is made of tinkerers and hobbyists. Some of this community is made up of entrepreneurs trying to solve problems in new and innovative ways using currently available technology. The remainder of this community is driven by the idea of creating new technology for entrepreneurs and tinkerers. Solder aims to capture that entire market in one place by providing a solution that is easy to access and all encompassing.
The Basics
After reviewing some common site structures, we white boarded a basic layout for the minimum necessary pages.
Solder - Homepage
Paradigms for a unique market
Due to the nature of printed circuit boards and single board computers, we decided to incorporate a “Quickview” modal paradigm so that patrons could, in-effect, inspect the device in question. Many PCB’s and SBC’s have minor iterative changes not always reflected in their descriptions and research showed our audience wanted to be able to see the onboard devices.
Our Unique story
Homepages are often a sampler platter of the different products, features, and messaging strategy of the overall site. Solder is no exception. The stakeholders wanted an “about” section, a personality blurb, on the homepage in hopes of better connecting with our target audience.
Our Unique Journey
Rather than calling our articles and community engagement section a blog, we thought of it as a market place of ideas. This allowed us to showcase both hobbyists projects and major company deployments in a way that would functionally close the gap between showcasing someone's passion project and a commercially available product that once had a humble beginning in a garage.
E-commerce
Solder was designed to solve several e-commerce problems within the PCB and SBC sphere. This would including a one-stop-shop to buy from hobbyists and private auctioneers in addition to our own, carefully crafted, products for emerging markets all over the world.
Solder - Shop page
shopify-ing the experience
Many tinkerers and entrepreneurs already know what they want. We created a shopify-like platform that would allow us to not only sell our own products, but would offer users a space to create seller accounts and begin selling their own products or resell existing commercially available PCB’s or SBC’s.
The fledgling website I was brought on to overhaul lacked many of the standard paradigms in an online shopping user experience. The original page had items displayed in portrait orientation and every device was photographed from above. This created a look more in line with documentation rather than a product image. I changed the layout of the shop page to fit a square aspect ratio for better integration with social media and created guidelines for photographing the products at angles that would make them more appealing. In addition to layout changes, I also suggested we highlight the best converting items on both the shop page and on the homepage. This would be to label them as “hot” or “new” and force them to the top of the page.
While we were not Ebay or Amazon, I needed to incorporate many standard UI and UX concepts those platforms offered while still honoring my stakeholders’ request to keep the site looking like a brick and mortar store. This led to me integrating a purchase button in the lower right of the items’ thumbnails. While less common with large online shopping sites, we saw a 22% increase in users purchasing multiple items.
Solder - Product Page
Best practices
Their original product page was missing standard shopping UX, UI, and SEO elements like:
Integration of customer reviews
The addition of customer quotes in product descriptions
Cross selling of products
Quantity selectors
Thumbnails to product image galleries
Sections explaining more about the brand with visuals and text
Note: The customer reviews were originally higher up on the page but after reviewing our analytics, moving them below the “You May Also Like” section this lead to an increase in “impulse buys” by 31% at checkout.
Article example
showcasing the best and brightest
Single Board Computer manufactures like The Raspberry Pi Foundation and DFRobot are diligent in showcasing products and inventions powered by they’re hardware. But we believed there was a way to transcend those markets and open the conversation to a wider and larger audience.
We could showcase tinker’s, entrepreneurs and emerging technology in a way that didn’t limit us to a hand full of popular SBC’s. And we could showcase and even “shopify” the components used in their efforts.
We wanted to inspire curious minds and support the future of this emerging market.
