Walmart.com’s New
Fashion Experience
Overview of Challenges
Dive deeper into the needs of walmart’s core audience to better understand their behaviors and key drivers to the fashion category.
In order to address the major pain points found on the site, the team wanted to take a step back and truly understand what drives people to use an eCommerce platform and shop for high end fashion products. The goal is to redesign a cleaner and more modern digital shopping experience.
Effectively communicate our design process with multiple stakeholders, while understanding their distinct goals and needs.
We worked alongside various teams and categories inside walmart with distinct roadmaps. This meant adapting our workflow and constraints multiple times, as well as prioritizing work based on areas of high impact and “picking our battles” effectively.
Conduct a complete and responsive visual design experience.
One of the goals of this project is to tackle responsive solutions and utilize material design guidelines and patterns across the fashion category.
Project Highlights
Identify and prioritize key pain points
Before our team jumped into the launch of Lord & Taylor flagship store, the fashion category had piled up many conceptual, usability and technical issues across the two shops: Everyday Brands and Premium Brands. We attended several user testing sessions conducted by the team in order to identify the shopping experiences.
After testing, we prioritized the following key issues based on severity and overall impact:
First, users don’t understand how to browse for a product on a broad department list Walmart.com offers a variety of brands on their site showing a broad list of departments and categories causing major confusion amongst users.
Second, users don’t know how to search within the shops:
Walmart’s site offers multiple brands, within the fashion category. Users had a difficult time finding and distinguishing their shopping experience.
Screening and Recruiting Participants
We set aside two weeks to do market and customer research. We utilize software for screening and recruiting participants.
We identified three customer models to design for:
— Premium shopper: Interested on finding high quality garments, with personalized recommendations, curated products and seeking premium market goods.
— Everyday shopper:Relies on reviews, and customer service.
Shops for a need, with a certain budget.
— Saving/deal shopper:
Heavily relies on deals, discounts and everyday apparel products
Because Walmart’s Apparel category is fashion forward, we suggested the following focus:
— Premium and Everyday shopper: (primary focus)
Will constantly interact with the latest trends, and everyday brands. They will browse through the app/site in a clear and direct way.
— Saving/deal shopper: (secondary focus)
Will appreciate the occasional savings offered through the app/site.
Sketch and UX Flows
After wireframing and prioritizing what ideas we wanted to prototype, we redesigned core flows focusing on:
— Different ways to search within the Fashion Category
— A clear flow between Premium brands and everyday brands
— Developing a more direct search
— Focusing on mobile first and seeing how this translates to desktop
— Being very mindful of responsive design
Prototyping & Testing
We consolidated our different ideas and created two prototypes, conducting two rounds of user testing with Walmart’s Fashion target audience.
Some of the scenarios we tested:
— Understanding different types of searches
— Understanding how to distinguish a\ premium item versus an everyday item
— Finding previous searched brands by filtering and sorting
Prototype A: Mobile App
Prototype B: Responsive Mobile
Insights & Solutions
After our user testing sessions, we found several key insights
– Separating items by categories within the direct search matches user’s shopping habits. This meant dividing items by recently searched products.
– Organizing all departments and categories. Adding “Premium Brands” tab had a positive response by users. This flow gave them a more precise representation of what they are searching for.
– The “Sort & Filter” resonated better with users. A more accurate tool to select color, price, brand, retailer, etc.
Mobile App:
Department Search/Premium Brands
Mobile version/Responsive: Department Search/Premium Brands
Visual Design system for the New Fashion Experience
Once we moved into visual design, we wanted the UI to reflect the journey with our user research.
Premium shopper, everyday shopper and saving/deal shopper.
Designing the Premium Brands page
Our team focused primarily on the premium brands page. We gave the New Fashion Experience a specific look/feel to premium brands. In addition to consolidating them into a single section, we wanted to bring an elevated and distinct experience for the premium shoppers.
Constraints
– Due to technical constraints, we couldn’t combine the desktop/tablet/mobile hero images to the mobile app. A secondary design opportunity was introduced to the mobile experience to keep it simple and direct for the users when navigating through the experience.
– Due to marketing constraints, we couldn’t avoid incorporating the gray bar “Premium Brands from Lord & Taylor”. This was arranged and discussed between partners and it went beyond our testing results make that update.
What I learned
— Enthusiasm, initiative & consistency are key components to move projects forward within a large organization.
Our team had to take initiative to explain the benefits of user-centered design to stakeholders that were unfamiliar with
how this affects the experience of the users. We also needed to compromise and be consistent with solutions when
forces beyond our control blocked us.
— Finding new challenges within the project keeps you focus on the main outcome.
We encountered several roadblocks during the duration of the project. Focusing on secondary aspects and learning new processes helped me stay focused and motivated.
My team responsibilities
Product team(Fashion Category)
— 1 Creative Manager
— 1 Product Manager
— 3 Product Designers
— 2 Digital Designers
— 2 Production Artists
— 1 Product Owner
— 3 iOS Developers
— 2 Android Developers
— 1 Quality Assurance Engineer
My responsibilities for this project with some team members
— Conducting research interviews and user-centered design exercises (with researchers)
— Prioritizing key findings (as a team)
— Communicating vision to stakeholders from the marketing team (as a team)
— Creating testable prototypes + conducing user testing
— Guiding the UI and visual outcomes
— Creating visual compositions and visual guidelines