Client
High-End Department Store Chain
Sector
Retail
Duration
Three months
What we did
Digital strategy
User experience design
Front-end development
Responsive design
Training and workshops

Like many large e–commerce retailers, our client had a range of digital products of varying age and polish: a traditional desktop website, a basic mobile site, and native apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android. These products lacked a cohesive design language, and to update any one of them would be a long, arduous process. This is frustrating, both for the teams working on these products, not to mention end users.

Early in our engagement, we recognised that a shiny set of deliverables – whilst alluring – would have very little impact on the organisation’s long-term capacity to deliver user–centered design. Instead, we adopted the role of a coach, working  within the product teams, immersed in their environment every day. Our goal was to help build the team’s internal design capacity, confidence and culture.

It was our mission to make sure that we transferred design skills and practices to the team so that they could work independently. During one of our final product demos, I sat back and watched the team deliver a compelling story about how the new product was going to improve the lives of their customers, and I knew the future of this team was in safe hands.
James Box, Director of User Experience

The Results

A set of project principles

Through a process of collaboration, we initiated the creation of a unified visual language and a library of interface patterns. The team can now repeat and scale this process.

A toolkit of methods

Working together on a typical user journey, we gave the team a toolkit of methods that they can use to deliver better, faster, and more effective products for their customers.

A confident and proactive team

After our collaborative exercises, the designers and developers were better equipped to confidently tackle ongoing challenges.

The Full Story

A diagram showing divergence, followed by convergence, repeated.
Project planning

How do you provide long term value to an in-house team?

Instead of commissioning Clearleft to deliver yet another product, or redesign an existing service, our client asked us to work closely with their internal teams to help them work in a faster, more collaborative manner, with greater empathy for customer’s needs and goals. We helped the product teams embrace techniques around multi–disciplinary collaboration and the benefits of iterative delivery through learning.

Post-it notes on a wall.
Assumption mapping

How do you set a team on a new, user-focused trajectory?

A Clearleft team of UX, UI, content and front-end development experts worked on–site for an intense three-month period of collaboration. Our goal was to build the confidence and capabilities of the teams to operate in a rapid, yet rewarding manner and place customers at the heart of the design process.

A table covered with pieces of paper.
Auditing design patterns on the legacy platform

Operating as a single, cross–functional team, we collaborated on user-focused activities like persona generation, customer journey mapping and content prioritisation. By the end of our engagement, we translated these learnings into a set of project principles, a unified visual language and a library of interface patterns that would help underpin a new responsive offering.

By working in a lightweight, nimble way, using repeatable techniques that could be reproduced and scaled to the wider organisation, Clearleft provided the team with tangible techniques and a springboard to deliver better, faster, and more effective products for their customers.

More work