Rebuilding a flagship e-commerce experience — one A/B test at a time
Vivint
UI/UX Design
Vivint.com
Vivint
UI/UX Design
Vivint.com
Vivint brought me on after a failed website rebrand with an outside agency had tanked conversion rates. The team realized they needed a dedicated in-house UX designer to salvage the project. I was hired as the sole UX designer on a cross-functional team, embedded with the Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) team, working across design, development, and analytics to revive vivint.com as the primary lead-generation engine for the National Inside Sales (NIS) team.
I led the design through many months of iterative redesign work: covering a failed rebrand, leading two full brand refreshes, establishing a component-based design system, and running continuous A/B testing to validate every change before it shipped.
When I joined Vivint, the website was in recovery mode. A recent rebrand attempt had gone live without sufficient testing, and the result was an immediate and significant drop in leads and sales — a major problem for a company where vivint.com is the primary lead-generation engine for the Inside sales team. The rebrand still needed to happen, but the previous approach — ship everything at once and hope for the best — had proven catastrophic.
Compounding the challenge, Vivint operated in an emerging category. Smart home security was still new enough that most visitors arrived at the site without a clear understanding of what the product did or why they needed it. Every design decision had to balance brand storytelling with customer education, all while protecting conversion performance.
How do you successfully rebrand a high-traffic e-commerce site without losing the leads and sales that fund the business? And how do you educate a customer base on an unfamiliar product category without overwhelming them with information?
In 2020, Vivint launched a major corporate rebrand — shifting from “Vivint Smart Home” to simply “Vivint.” The homepage and all major components needed to reflect the new brand, but the team couldn't afford a repeat of the previous failed rebrand. Any change that touched conversion had to be proven before it shipped.
I rebuilt the site one component at a time, using A/B testing as the gate for every meaningful change. Instead of a big-bang rebrand, I worked closely with the CRO team to test new versions of hero modules, product cards, navigation, and CTAs against their existing counterparts — only shipping changes that demonstrated statistical significance and positive performance. This methodical approach meant the full rebrand rolled out over six months, but with zero negative impact to leads.
I also partnered with the copy team to develop a stronger user narrative, aligning visual design with messaging that better addressed customer uncertainty about the smart home category. Toward the end of 2021, we tested two new video components designed to educate visitors and showcase brand assets in action.
Beyond individual campaigns, I own and maintain the component library for vivint.com. Every component is built in Figma with auto-layout, documented with usage notes, and organized by page module type and product category. This system makes it possible to design new pages quickly, make modifications with confidence, and collaborate closely with the engineering team during handoff. Documentation is the unglamorous part of design system work, but it's where the real leverage lives — and it's my favorite part of the job.
The rebrand rolled out successfully over six months with no decline in leads or sales — a direct reversal of the previous agency-led attempt. The video component test delivered a 21.5% lift in conversion rate, moving from 1.09% to 1.33% within days of launch.
More broadly, the shift from big-bang redesigns to component-level A/B testing fundamentally changed how the team approached website changes. Every update now runs through validation before shipping, and the design system ensures consistency across the hundreds of pages and campaigns that live on vivint.com. The site is constantly evolving, which keeps the work fresh — and keeps discovering how customers actually engage with a brand in a category that's still defining itself.
