Igniting Home Depot's transformation with UX-driven innovation and prototyping excellence. (2015/2016)
Intro - Heritage
Honoring Founders: Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank
At it's start, The Home Depot was co-founded by Bernard Marcus, Arthur Blank, Ron Brill, and Pat Farrah in 1978. What began as a superstore for Home Improvement enthusiasts quickly became America's go-to retailer for most house, gardening, construction and seasonal needs. The edge noticed in Home Depot had to be Leaderships particular detail to maintaining that "know your customers" principles which Arthur and company lived by. I never not once felt bad or remotely out of pocket for questioning if a particular feature seemed far removed from the Customer Journey or if people "actually do this in the wild" (offline). I found their historical view refreshing. Home Depot puts customers first, and it shows.
After showing my appreciation to these individuals as well as to Carol Hedeen and many other fearless Home Depot leaders, it's time to explore the case study.
1. Problem - Customer pain points
CUSTOMER PAIN POINTS BEING SOLVED:
1) As a customer, I would like a better account experience.
2) As a customer that placed an order, I would like to track my order easier. IF there are multiple orders, THEN I would need a way to track multiple orders.
3) As a prospective customer, I would like to know the benefits of opening a Home Depot account.
Through agile collaboration with multiple cross-functional workstreams, while at Home Depot I helped my UX Team nail critical milestones, amping up customer engagement and turbocharging self-service that lead to double digit revenue growth in buy-again orders as well as key growth in AOV from Account Personalization. I also had the distinct honor of working alongside a top-notch UX Architect, she was very much my mentor in Information Architecture.
Home Depot was crowned Internet Retailer of the Year back in 2014, a bit before I came on board, let's dive into Home Depot's high-octane 2015-2016 journey in solving Account and Self-service pain points.
2. Framework: Voice of the Customer and Fast-moving Actionables
Data meets Innovation
All good things start with data. We pulled from a/b User Testing conducted through Opinion Lab as well as Foresee and a ton of feedback loops with actual Customers which my brilliant Product Team discovered.
Accessibility
Ensuring accessibility was paramount. Our Team focused on screen-readers, tabulation experiences, and greyscale interaction, aiming for a consistent, inclusive shopping experience for all Home Depot customers.
Architecture and Innovation
While Data was critical – especially with the amounts of users in-store and online who landed in the Account Portal, data didn't drive architecture and design decisions solely; it supported it. Intellectual risks are 80% data and 20% innovation; we flexed that intellectual muscle like a champ when throttling up on release cycle of features.
Below are wireframes of concepts with the Account Team.
Power up mobile dashboard flow
Once Registered, the dashboard experience would take shape. A conceptual idea beginning with mobile interfacing.
Motion
Taking a cue from Google Material movement, I began to concept the idea of their "consistent choreography" within animation of User Interface elements. On a TAP or CLICK their should be a harmony of smooth transition and solid hierarchy without looking haphazard..or a flash project from 1998.
An example of Google Material Design Animation choreography.
In practice with Choreographed animation via Google Material Design philosophy
Motion Philosophy applied to Large Site and Tablet
MultiChannel and Breadth of Work
Deviating from design-philosphy a bit (while also staying true to my agreement with my friends over at Home Depot) below are concepts during my time with HD. The nobler motives and objective of stakeholders within my team always championed around User-Satisfaction and Customer Success. Truly enjoyed my time at Home Depot and count many of those folks as friends. A few concepts below.
Mobile Order Tracking Chat component: In Motion
Other Explorations
Sidebar Restyled
MAML Home Depot 2015 UX List flow
Create List
New list Created
Order Tracking Card with Buy Again feature
3. Write-Ups and Publications
Under the visionary leadership of the 2015-16 Home Depot UX team, we delivered brilliant work over months that drove remarkable growth and acclaim.
Our intense focus on customer-centric design led to two Baymard Institute case studies highlighting the specific patterns my UX Architect mentor and I developed. It was an incredible honor to collaborate with this talented team of leaders and designers to create standout experiences for Home Depot customers. Some which still carry remnants to this day with Sean's legendary ongoing work.
Baymard Institute - First Accolade
Self-Service UX: Integrate All Order Tracking Info and Events Within the E-Commerce Site Itself (E-Commerce: Order Tracking Optimization)
-Baymard Institute
https://baymard.com/blog/integrate-tracking-info
Pattern in Sketch (what we used back in 2015/2016:
Baymard Institute - Second Accolade
Order Cancellation Request: Have a ‘Cancellation Requested’ Order State
-Baymard Institute
https://baymard.com/blog/cancellation-requested-order-state
That's it, Gracias por tu tiempo hoy...
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