Shower Door Selector

Balancing Great Customer UX with Supply Chain Realities

The Challenge

High anxiety and structural measurement friction made online shower door selection an active drop-off hotspot for customers.

Role - Initial configurator discovery, cross-functional constraint negotiation, multi-model guidance exploration, and final Guided Tabs interface design.

Team - 1 Senior Designer (Me), 1 Product Manager, 1 Content Designer, 1 UX Researcher, Engineering, Data Science.

Timeline - 3 Months (Discovery through Guided Selling Tab System Handoff).

The Strategy

Reframed the project from a heavy, system-breaking dynamic configurator to an infrastructure-compliant Guided Selling platform.

The Outcome

$10

13%

12-16%

In Revenue

Engagement

Conversion

The Problem

Shopping for a shower door online is one of the highest-friction decisions in the home improvement journey. Customers are asked to make precise choices, layout, measurements, opening type and often without confidence that they’re choosing correctly. 

The goal of the Shower Door Selector was to reduce anxiety and help customers confidently find a door that would work in their space, while also respecting the realities of e-commerce fulfillment.

Early Direction: A Configurator Assumption

Our initial hypothesis was that customers needed a configurator-style experience to guide them step-by-step through the decision.

To test this, we explored two directions: 

A multi-step guided configurator.
A PDP-based configurator that updated imagery and pricing in real time.

Phase 1

The Configurator Hypothesis Collapse

The Strategy: Designing and user-testing two distinct configurator directional flows to track customer control and validation habits.

Usability testing quickly surfaced a key insight: 

Customers strongly preferred the PDP-based experience.
Customers preferred control over progression.
Seeing the product image update as they made selections.
Watching price change in real time.
Collapsible accordions that revealed progress without forcing steps.
Inline education (e.g., “help me measure” tooltips).
Step-based flows felt slow and restrictive.
PDP configurators created strong confidence, but implied a level of customization the backend couldn’t support.

Phase 2

Navigating the Supply Chain Constraint

The Strategy: Pivoting the product strategy once engineering revealed that the preferred frontend experience conflicted with fixed drop-ship SKU backend realities.

Designing for the Supply Chain

While users deeply loved the concept of a live dynamic page builder, a massive backend constraint surfaced during technical discovery. The dynamic layout experience implied a fully custom-manufactured product. In reality, Lowe's handles shower doors as fixed, third-party vendor drop-ship inventory SKUs.

If we allowed a customer to input entirely custom dimensions, the system would create catastrophic order fulfillment errors on the backend. To avoid this, I successfully led our cross-functional team's pivot away from a custom configurator canvas into an enterprise-compliant decision guidance system.

Phase 3

The Guided Tabs Architecture

The Strategy: Exploring three distinct guidance patterns—Quizzes, PLP Tabs, and Smart Filters—before launching the final hybrid template.

The Winning Architecture

I explored, designed, and pitched three unique guidance structures to our engineering and product stakeholders. The winner was our Guided Shower Tabs layout deployed live on the Product Listing Page (PLP). This elegant template successfully broke complex architectural decisions down into digestible chunks, gave users full structural control to change their layout properties in any order, and worked flawlessly using Lowe's existing database columns without creating any fulfillment risk.

1. Shower Door Quiz

This concept reframed the experience as a quiz-style entry point, similar to other successful finders on the site. 

Purpose:

Help customers who feel overwhelmed or don’t know where to start.
Reduce anxiety by asking simple, plain-language questions.

Tradeoff:

Risked reintroducing drop-off from step-based flows if overused.

2. Guided Tabs on the PLP

This concept layered guidance directly into the PLP, allowing customers to self-direct without committing to a full flow. 

Purpose:

Let customers explore criteria non-linearly.
Aligned more closely with natural browsing behavior.

Tradeoff:

Needed strong callouts and education to avoid feeling redundant with filters.

3. Hybrid Smart Filters

The concept combined the strengths of both ideas.  

Purpose:

Use the existing filter system as the foundation.
Understand which filters mattered most for their situation.

Tradeoff:

It provided less explicit step-by-step direction than a quiz or configurator.

The Final Experience
Guided Shower Tabs

Guided Shower Tabs struck the right balance across all constraints: 

For customers

Reduced anxiety by breaking decisions into understandable chunks.
Preserved freedom to explore and revise choices.
Made education visible before mistakes were made.

For the business

Worked within existing PLP and filter infrastructure.
Avoided backend complexity and fulfillment risk.
Scaled to other high-consideration categories.

For engineering

Leveraged existing components with minimal net-new logic.
Allowed phased rollout and testing.

Tradeoffs & Delivery

What This Taught Me

The Tradeoffs: Moving completely away from our initial interactive configurator hypothesis meant intentionally prioritizing guided selling patterns over dynamic canvas layouts. While a live page configurator tested incredibly well with users, it risked implying custom fulfillment variables that our drop-ship backend suppliers simply could not support.

The Delivery Strategy: We chose to build a Guided Tab architecture on the Product Listing Page. This leveraged our existing filtering infrastructure, drastically reduced net-new engineering logic, and eliminated backend fulfillment risks.

Balancing Usability with Backend Realities: Highly interactive, complex experiences look great in design critiques, but they fail if the supply chain system breaks behind them. The most usable, scalable solution is rarely the most complex technical one.

Reframing Product Challenges: True product design success requires knowing when to stop asking "how do we build this feature" and instead ask "what core problem is the user trying to solve here".

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