Solaire Mattress
Introducing a technically complex adjustable mattress through an immersive, understandable buying experience.
The brief
Explain 50 comfort settings without creating 50 decisions.
Solaire launched in April 2019 as Saatva's fourth mattress and its answer to Sleep Number. The product offered 50 firmness settings and a sophisticated internal system, but the entire digital experience had to be designed and built in one quarter.
The challenge was to make the engineering feel valuable rather than intimidating, then carry that clarity all the way into configuration and purchase.
01 / Research
Learn from the closest existing behavior
I surveyed people who had purchased a Sleep Number mattress in the previous year, then followed up with interviews to understand how they evaluated adjustability, what they struggled to compare and which claims created trust.
Whiteboarding and rapid sketching turned those findings into an experience model that could fit the launch timeline.
02 / Product page
Tell the engineering story visually
The mattress page moved from benefit to proof: materials, construction, adjustability and a direct comparison with Sleep Number. A full-screen 3D diagram let customers inspect the system rather than take claims on faith.
03 / 3D tour
Make an invisible system explorable
The interactive tour let customers click or swipe through every mattress layer. It turned a dense technical diagram into a sequence people could understand at their own pace.
04 / Shop
Reflect every configuration in real time
The shop page used 3D renders to update the product image for each selected configuration. Customers could see the exact mattress, size and base combination they were building before committing.
05 / Learning
Launch is where the next research cycle starts
Performance data showed healthy time on site and that converting customers spent the most time on the product page. It also suggested that important content and the 3D tour were not being discovered consistently.
Six follow-up usability sessions confirmed the scroll and discovery problem. The recommendation was to make the 3D tour more prominent and use it as a focused landing experience for affiliate traffic.
