Retail redesign, less risk.

How do you design & deploy a new retail website, while implementing a new design system?

Details in this case study may be purposefully vague to protect the client.

01 – High Level

Services

Competitive Analysis
Workshop facilitation
Design System Consulting
Research/Analysis (qual)
Roadmap Planning
UX/UI Design
Stakeholder Training

Deliverables

Problem Solution Workshop
Customer Journey Maps
Wireframes
Design System Foundation
Roadmap
User Research Reports
Product/Design Briefs

Outcomes

Working in a small 2 week window we ran a competitive assessment, facilitated a problem identification workshop, and laid the ground work for how to build a design system.

Leveraging the first 2 weeks and a customer journey map, we created a roadmap for the team to align to. We met multiple times a week over the duration of the project to lead research and hold the team accountable to the plan.

02 – Understanding The Problems

Redesigns are risky, we partnered with the client to reduce the risk.

A unique approach

This engagement required a different type of execution from our team at Accenture. We were brought in after 2 years of running iterative designs or DDO experiments on their site to help guide/consult their internal team for a large redesign.

We had a lot of data from previous DDO experiments, however, we needed to do more research on the competitive landscape.

Research & Discovery

I performed a competitive heuristic to help ground the Patagonia team where they stood against competitors. Multiple participants scored the mobile & desktop sites of competitors and the client in order to create a current state for the client team to understand the gaps and advantages they had.

The Problem Workshop

I co-led this workshop with our internal product lead, dividing up sections as it made sense to the flow of the kickoff. The interesting parts of this workshop came from the Experience Mapping Exercise we prepared. Experience maps bring together the customer experience and business goals. We documented high-level goals, problems in the way of those goals, and lay the groundwork for hypotheses and testing.

Through this exercise we had the Patagonia team place stickies on poster paper based on the following:

What are your goals, and customer needs.
Brainstorm every action the customer takes as they learn about Patagonia and make a purchase. Place these on the wall in the order they occur.
With the actions on the wall, place each of the customer goals with the action that addresses that goal. Add a note where this happens on the website.
Look at the rough maps you’ve made. Where is there a mismatch between customer goals and customer actions? Where does the website fail to support those goals or actions?
After reviewing each group’s map, we laid out a journey map that the group could all agree on. These collective journey maps were the foundation of the problem identification rounds we later performed. We’d later validate these roadmaps with user data, but for now it’s great to have for idea generation.

Heuristic evaluation

Once the main problem identification round was completed I took them through how the data was gathered and what conclusions we came to. Our goal here was to avoid biasing the Patagonia team, by letting them think of their own problems without piggybacking off of this evaluation presented in the workshop.

High level results

The main gaps identified were in the bottom of funnel and product discovery phases. Most of their competitors had more robust search/filter/browse functions. We don’t offer solutions at this phase but offer these as thought starters in the workshop. This data was added to the evolving journey map.

03 – The Solutions & Outcome

Providing a solid foundation to build upon.

Starting small… really small

Patagonia was interested in Atomic Design and how to implement this throughout the organization. I pulled from my experiences while is worked at Sears/Kmart, when I co-developed the enterprise style guide with another art director and lead developer.

Implementing a design system

I consulted on how to setup the pieces of atomic design system: what should be atoms, molecules etc and how to stress test the system. Most importantly stress testing the system, it takes time and people willing to commit a lot of time redoing pages looking for gotchas and shortcomings.

Research led journey

We supported the redesign process by fulfilling all of Patagonia’s research needs. In the end we ran over 17 tests covering the entire shopping flow. We ran card sorting, moderated and unmoderated tests each generating pages of insights that helped the success of the this project. If you visit Patagonia today, you can see our influences on almost every page.

Product briefs/design plans

We put together each phase of the roadmap and prepared the product briefs or design plans within these phases. This plan contained the how this tied to the clients goals, the main problem, the hypothesis to guide the designer, business justification, what pieces in the atomic library would be “net new”, associated research and validation plans.

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