Author: Spectrum Team

As the Spectrum Customizer has grown, we’ve learned some products, and categories, lend themselves to product customization more readily than others. In the highly-competitive technology category, it’s critical for brands to avoid becoming a commodity or building a “me too” image. For this category, offering product customization is a great way to differentiate the brand, while also creating unique points of contact and engagement with their top fans.

Generally speaking, technology consumers thrive on expressing themselves through the products they buy, leveling up their product experience with uniqueness when possible. One need only look at the custom subculture in gaming and music as examples of this underlying trend. Unfortunately, in a category where consumers demand innovation and have a passion for self-expression, few brands capitalize on those audience needs, falling into a potential parity trap.

For brands interested in providing product customization, it is critical to find the best customization opportunities with product lines. Spectrum helps our clients evaluate product popularity, velocity, release schedules, product styling and ease of embellishment to determine the best product customization opportunities. Within the technology sector, these types of options can take a variety of forms, such as:

• Personal photos wrapped around a Bluetooth speaker 
• Custom graphics for removable headphone tags
• Color and texture options for gaming controllers

As users spend time customizing their favorite products, the quality of the user experience must inspire their confidence. The best brands deliver a seamless UX brand experience, combined with high-quality product images, allowing potential buyers to thoroughly inspect their custom product at every angle and purchase confidently, resulting in far fewer dissatisfied customers. In fact, this type of product experience and inspection perfectly aligns with an audience that is inherently technology-focused.

However, on-screen customization without the ability to effectively deliver user-designed files to a factory is useless. Spectrum begins our process at this point, working backwards, ensuring 100% factory integration with our clients and production facilities. If your existing production facilities may not be able to easily handle custom production, Spectrum has over 45 factory partners across the world that can augment your facilities, providing multiple options to fulfill your tech audience’s wishes.

If you’re looking to take advantage of your strongest brand advocates, and give them ways to express themselves with your products, consider adding a product customization platform and separating yourself from your competition.

Since we first launched our product customizer, we’ve always provided a form of administrative tools to our clients. The first phase of our tool focused on text moderation and reporting. In the second phase, our focus turned to helping clients optimize their customer workflow, particularly around frequently-changing customization options. Now, as our global client base has grown and our customization platform has evolved, we’ve uncovered even more opportunities for functionality within our admin tool. After an extensive UX prototyping phase with considerable client testing and feedback, we are now launching the next evolution of our administrative tools, focused in the following areas:

1. User and order management

• Ability to provide varying levels of member access levels + user management
• Navigation elements configured per client based on the features of their customization program and product licensing
• Admins have the ability to impersonate other users on their team, allowing them to more easily answer questions and troubleshoot issues for others.
• Order management and search functionality of order data, including date, PO, export functionality for further customer support by CSR’s and at the factory level. Note – does not allow for changing the status of an order. 

2. Product management – manage components real-time to ensure consumers are only making selections that are available at the factory 

• Live/Not live toggle for components – allowing the ability to toggle off and on specific components so clients can be confident the platform is only showing products available to be ordered 
• Flexible thumbnail management allows client to use RGB HEX values (perfect for flat colors) or images (to better showcase more detailed materials, such as metallics)

3. Personalization management

• Manage personalization elements, including stock art, prints and patterns (add, categorize, re-order selection)
• Fonts management including availability and order of fonts for text-based personalization of products

4. Moderation

• Developed a guide for defining text moderation expectations within the admin tool including character replacement and deny list case sensitivity. Also added ways to update the deny list, including bulk import capability.
• Automated moderation of text and images is also available using industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) services, which helps to protect brand image without requiring a team of moderators. 
• Improved functionality to allow clients to define specific images that should bypass image moderation. This was a frequent request among clients using our AI service, so we added the functionality. 
• For clients that have human review as part of their content moderation, we’ve added the ability for clients to moderate images or questionable content uploaded by users. 

5. Reporting

• Ability to refine your custom program based on real-time order data
• Create trends out of custom products are being ordered (which colors are most popular, what fonts are being used the most) 
• Provide daily order summaries – streamlines analysis of custom order information

Please reach out if you’d like to learn more about our admin tools or any aspects of the Spectrum 3D customization platform.

Maintaining an e-commerce site means constantly evaluating and implementing third-party software to maximize your users’ experience and site performance. More third-party integrations mean more potential complications, workarounds, and ultimately, disruptions to your e-commerce process. Conversely, when consumers have a smooth shopping experience, without experiencing weird frames or 3rd party URLs, it solidifies the brand in the consumer’s mind, building credibility. In fact, Forrester quantified that good UX can raise ecomm ROI by 200% and excellent UX can raise ROI by over 400%.  

Our Approach

We recognize the importance of a consistent user experience, so when introducing brands to product customization, we begin with an integrated approach, considering both design and user experience to create an innovative touch point that only your brand can offer. Spectrum was born on a fundamental foundation to be designed around a brand’s DNA, delivering a unique and consistent branded experience.  This flexibility in UX and design doesn’t mean it will be code-heavy, however. We place a premium on optimizing for asset sizes, SEO terms and load times.

Spectrum’s platform is designed around your brand’s DNA

The Spectrum platform minimizes the need for additional resources for initial integration. With over 10 years of experience and usability analytics tracked across millions of product configurations, we are the leading experts supporting a wide variety of UX services for our clients. Our UX team guides clients who are new to product customization, helping them decide what (and how many) features would be best to personalize. We support and supplement a brand’s internal design teams with UI best practices, usability feedback and recommendations. Your in-house design team won’t need any expertise to match look and feel, as it’s easily done through the Spectrum platform.

If you are considering offering product customization internationally, we have an easy process for localization. Spectrum’s platform provides clients the easy ability to provide a consistent brand experience across all languages and markets your company operates in.

UX continuity creates a consistent experience for your customer, ultimately reducing bounce rates by 50% and product detail page abandonment rates. Our UX team will work with you to provide the most seamless product customization experience for your users.