In January 2020, we kicked off the year by improving the applications we released at the end of 2019 and made several user-experience (UX) tweaks throughout the website.
Here are the major updates to Samtec.com for January 2020.
High-Speed Cable Builder Phase 2 UX Updates
In late December we released our newest version of our High-Speed Cable Builder, which allows users to configure these products online.
In January, we made a series of user-experience updates to this application based on initial feedback. These updates include:
- Adding a 3D model viewer and download tool to eligible series so users can easily download models online
- Streamlining the 3D model request submission process so users can more easily request 3D models when downloads aren’t available.
- Adding an easier way to get to the Tech Specs pages for additional details
- Clean up validations on some series causing issues with various part numbers.
Keep an eye out for additional UX updates to this application as it matures.
Mobile Breadcrumbs
With the “mobile-first” movement sweeping the web in the past few years, the mobile experience has been a key focus of ours when developing new applications and supporting existing applications on Samtec.com.
Even with Samtec.com being primarily a B2B desktop-focused website, our mobile traffic has increased 400% in the past year. We don’t see any signs of this slowing down.
Recently we added mobile breadcrumbs to a large chunk of our content pages on the website. These will allow users to easily go back to the parent page in that category and help to interlink the pages much better than the mobile menu alone.
This may not seem like a significant update, but it’s through small and consistent tweaks like this as well as developing new mobile-friendly applications that we aim to create a top-notch mobile experience for Samtec.com.
A Better “New Visitor” Experience
As the capabilities of the Internet grow, as policies evolve, and as user-experience continues to be a differentiator online, we have to be extremely cognizant of how our website users feel when they’re visiting Samtec.com.
With a few updates we made last year, we noticed that we added a few too many “checks” for new users on the website which didn’t make new users feel very welcome.
We had a location-tracking ask, which helps users with our mapping and sales rep lookup tools, a GDPR ask, which is required for doing business internationally, and a sample modal, which allows users to get more information about our sample program.
These few things coming up all at once, while they did enhance the website experience in those relevant areas, weren’t creating a great experience for initial users.
To solve this issue, we deferred the location-tracking until the user requests it by clicking a button to reveal it (pictured below), and also pushed the sample program sign-up behind the GDPR cookie acceptance button.
The GDPR banner is required, so we couldn’t remove that, but these other tweaks allow new users uninhibited access to Samtec.com while still allowing them to access the features above when they need them, a win/win.
New MicroTCA® Standards Page
MicroTCA® is a modular, open standard for building high performance switched fabric computer systems in a small form factor. At its core are standard Advanced Mezzanine Cards which provide processing and I/O functions.
MicroTCA systems are both physically smaller and less expensive than AdvancedTCA systems, although their internal architectures are largely the same. MicroTCA was originally intended for smaller telecom systems at the edge of the network but has moved into many non-telecom applications, with standardized, ruggedized versions becoming popular in mobile, military, telemetry, data acquisition, and avionics applications.
We have developed a new content page in our Industry Standards section of the website to support this standard. You can check it out here.
Coming Soon to Samtec.com
That does it for the major web updates this month.
Here is what we’re currently working on, and a few other updates that are coming soon!
- Continued upgrades to our e-commerce experience throughout the website
- Upgraded online order management features
- An updated version of our popular Picture Search tool
- Updated capabilities to manage profiles online
Keep an eye out for these updates and more coming soon!
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If you have any feedback or suggestions for our web team, feel free to send an email at eHelpDesk@samtec.com.
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