Elevating AED Advantage E-Commerce user experience. Streamlining life-saving solutions from discovery to purchase

Background

AED Advantage provides automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and related accessories, offering life-saving equipment to businesses, organizations, and individuals.

The Problem

AED Advantage offers a broad range of products and exceptional customer support, yet struggled to distinguish itself in a crowded AED market. With pricing and product photography largely standardized across the industry, our challenge was to help AED Advantage’s online store rise above the competition and truly stand out.

Challenges

With incredible customer service and expansive inventory of products, AED Advantage was looking for ways to standout amongst competitors.

  1. Average SEO: When customers search for AED's on google, AED advantage shows up on the second page search listings.

  2. Generic Product Photography: With standardized product photography from the AED manufacturers all AED sites look the same. Similar imagery, colors and products makes it difficult to tell each site apart.

  3. Users overwhelmed with choices: AED Advantage customer service line noted that many users were confused with all the options for AED's and while they were able to get the help they needed from the help line would love to be able to understand the product offerings better just from accessing the store/site.

  4. Under Utilized AED Management Program: AED Advantage offers a program where they help you manage the expiry of purchased AED parts such as pads and batteries. Customers were not utilizing this feature. Encouraging customers to signup will not only benefit them but also help retain customers for AED advantage long term.

Target Users

AED Advantage serves a wide range of users—from workplaces and schools to fitness centers and community spaces. We devoped user personas to properly understand the pain points of the users. To Summarize some of the customer base:

  • Everyday Users (Responders): Can be 18–70+ years old, such as employees, teachers, fitness staff, or volunteers—anyone who might need to use the AED in an emergency.

  • Home Users (Caregivers): Often 40–70 years old, caring for aging family members or those with heart conditions.

  • Decision Makers (Buyers): Typically 30–60 years old, including business owners, facilities managers, school administrators, and community leaders. They're looking for reliable, compliant solutions with ongoing support.

Goals

  • Improve site SEO and have AED Advantage show up on first page of google search.

  • Create an overall more cohesive brand that stands out from competitors and gains trust among customers, increasing converion rates and building a customer base.

  • Provide more product guidance to customers to help them understand the product offerings better.

  • Provide a more intuitive navigation to customers to make products more findable.

  • Increase signups for AED management program

Research

  • Collected insights from customer service representatives at AED Advantage and gained stakeholder insights about their audience.

  • Completed a competitor analysis to further investigate pain points and strengths of other AED stores.

  • Reviewed site analytics to understand customer drop off.

AED Management signup added to homepage and at checkout. This has allowed AED Advantage to grow their userbase in their management program, building trust with their audience and benefiting them long term on their product management.

Clear product photography shows customers everything that is included upon purchase. Bundle packs introduced with more specific details about use-case to help direct customer decisions

AED Product comparison tools now offer users a direct comparison on the difference between products beyond pricing. AED's are very complex and these insights are helpful to the users to understand their product better.

Product recommendations added to category pages to help customers understand he use cases of different devices and help them make the right choice.

Results

  • Returning Customers has increased by 80% since the previous year with an overall customer increase of 55%

  • Overall increase of checkout completions by 22% with a 10% increase in sessions that reached checkout.

My Role

Review and propose solutions: I reviewed their current store and came up with a list of site upgrades to help boost sales and overall store performance. I developed a proposal for the suggested updates.

Design Improvements: As part of the project, I led efforts to update the brand's visual identity, including art direction for new product photography that aligned with the refreshed brand style. I conducted research on best practices for e-commerce store upgrades, audited the existing online store, and provided strategic solutions to improve the user experience—focusing on product discoverability, educational content, and clear access to customer support.