Site News

Fixin’ iFixit

After developing them in secret for the past two months, on Monday night we launched a redesigned main page and parts store. We investigated and optimized every detail of the customer experience, with the knowledge that users all over the world will be accessing our content.

We built our own cart a while ago, and it’s received great reviews from customers and the press. But, we’ve learned a lot about our customers’ needs since then, and we thought we could improve several areas. With this redesign we’ve implemented dozens of suggestions and made some of our own improvements. Our number one customer comment was how awkward the mouse-over category navigation was on the left side of the site. We nixed it in favor of an easier-to-use, model-oriented navigation structure (which also works on the iPhone!). As happy as we are about that, though, it’s only one of a bunch of changes that we’re excited about.

Here are a few of the new features we’ve implemented on the main page:

  • Global search. Searching for a term such as “iPod” will now bring up all matching products, repair manuals, and discussions. You can sort through a specific document type, or you can browse through our entire site at the same time!
  • Navigation hub. The main page now links to the Parts Store, Repair Manuals, Teardowns, and Discussion forums. You can navigate to any of these pages by clicking on the appropriate icon at the top of the site.
  • Streamlined checkout process. It’s a much cleaner and more intuitive process than before. Try it out!
  • Speed. We’ve made hundreds of improvements to our server architecture, improving page load times across the board. Browsing iFixit should be fast.

Here’s our new main page:

We also changed the parts store website completely. In an effort to help our customers find the right parts for their devices, we’ve moved to a model-number-based approach. Once we know your model number, we can guarantee that every part we show you will work in your device. But what if you don’t know your model number? We still have category navigation on the right, as well as a site-wide search that puts products, repair articles, discussions, and parts at your fingertips.

The pictures below show the new version of the site. You can certainly also visit iFixit to view the new changes. First, the main parts store:

iFixit website redesign parts store

The MacBook parts subsection of the store:

Mac parts page on the iFixit website parts store redesign

And the revised shipping page:

iFixit shipping web page on the website redesign

We spent a lot of time testing our new site across various browsers and platforms. However, there may be an occasional hiccup that we missed. Please let us know if you like it, hate it, or see any bugs!