Salsita Helps SCUF Gaming Optimize Their eCommerce Presence

A powerful web-based product configurator and a comprehensive eCommerce audit

SCUF Gaming contacted Salsita for help implementing a powerful web-based product configurator for their customizable gaming controllers. After successfully completing the project, Salsita and SCUF have continued to work together on improving SCUF's eCommerce presence. Most recently, Salsita conducted a comprehensive audit of SCUF's e-shop and provided actionable insights on where the website could be optimized to improve customer experience and increase sales.

David Guerra had a problem. In his role as IT Director at SCUF Gaming, a leading provider of console and PC gaming controllers, he was overseeing a project to add a new product configurator to their website. The project was needed to support the launch of a new line of highly customizable gaming controllers. With the use of the planned configurator, shoppers would be able to create a product uniquely tailored to their preferences, choosing the colors, textures and styles of controller buttons, paddles, thumbsticks and more.

SCUF had engaged a large global digital agency to develop the online configurator. The agency did not meet expectations. In January 2019, with deadlines looming, David took to the internet seeking specialists in Facebook's React web framework, which formed the basis of the configurator.

His search led him to Salsita Software. Browsing their website, he was impressed by the breadth and sophistication of their web portfolio, which reflected their deep React expertise. An initial conversation with Salsita CEO Matthew Gertner led to a quick audit of the existing configurator code by Filip Naumovic, one of Salsita's senior user interface developers. Based on the thoroughness and expert detail in the audit's conclusions, David felt confident that he had found the right agency to take the project to its conclusion.

Although the existing configurator code base wasn't terrible, it was clear that the previous developers lacked expertise in React. So Filip and senior full-stack developer Jan Stegena ended up rewriting the configurator from scratch to take advantage of React best practices. Within three months, an initial version of the configurator had been completed with support for both desktop and mobile devices. An additional three months were spent on fine-tuning, improvements, and adding support for more configurator models.

The new controller went live on SCUF's website in July 2019. David was struck by the skill, professionalism, and responsiveness of the Salsita team. "Every member of the team was fun to work with and great at their job. I particularly appreciate how proactive the team was," he explained.

A Thorough UX Audit to Boost Sales

The companies stayed in touch, and SCUF reached out to Salsita from time to time to implement improvements to the configurator such as multilingual support. Then, in August 2020, David contacted Matthew to discuss a new project: a configurator for a new product launch, a customizable gaming headset that SCUF was bringing to market.

In addition to adapting the existing configurator to work with the new headset, SCUF asked Salsita to make some user experience (UX) improvements to the existing controller and to update and align the visual design with their new corporate branding guidelines. Once again Filip and Jan were assigned to the project, which kicked off in October and was completed two months later in December.

Around that time, Matthew and his Chief Strategy Officer, Dan Backhaus, were discussing the project and looking over the SCUF site. They felt that SCUF would be able to boost sales significantly by applying eCommerce best practices on the site. Matthew contacted David with a proposal: "How about we do a UX audit of your site and make some recommendations on how you might be able to increase your sales volume?"

David gave them the green light. Salsita assigned two of their UX analysts, Kseniia Simakhina and Katerina Kelepouri, to the audit. The two of them put the SCUF site under a microscope to evaluate it from a user experience perspective. They examined the Google site analytics and Hotjar heatmaps. They also ran a number of user testing sessions with both expert and casual gamers to identify areas where the website UX could be improved.

"The SCUF website is already pretty good," said Kseniia. "It looks nice, loads quickly and has a great mobile experience. We focused on areas where they might be losing sales due to unclear or inconsistent UX."

A week later, they presented their conclusions to SCUF. The report was wide-ranging, covering overall design, menu structure, information architecture, search, copywriting, configurator, shopping cart/checkout, and upselling/cross-selling.

Kseniia and Katerina spent another week preparing formal recommendations for improvements to address the issues they had unearthed. The recommendations were compiled into a slideshow presentation and a number of clickable prototypes for critical sections of the site implemented using Figma. The prototypes were user-tested to ensure that they addressed the UX deficiencies that had been identified in the previous round of user testing sessions.

The Salsita team then jumped onto another video conference with David and SCUF Marketing Manager Amy Clark to walk them through the slide deck and prototypes. The SCUF team was impressed. It was eye-opening for them to see a comprehensive set of recommendations for the issues surfaced by Salsita. Even for the issues which had been known to SCUF, it was invaluable to have a concrete plan of action vetted using analytics data, UX best practices, and user testing.

SCUF is currently putting in place a plan to implement a number of Salsita's recommendations on their eCommerce website, and they are looking forward to ongoing collaboration in the future. "The audit was great," said David. "I believe the Salsita team has become an invaluable asset to SCUF."