Macy's Reimagined

An improvement of key functionalities for Macy's and Bloomingdales iPhone apps, focusing on user behavior to provide a personalized shopping experience.

My Role

As a Product Designer at Tigerspike, I worked with the UX designer, project manager and SVP of strategy along with UX leads at Macy's. Together we discovered new opportunities in the mobile retail space through market research, user interviews, and on-site experiments. To evaluate our learnings, we conducted stakeholder meetings and user testing sessions using our high-fidelity prototypes.

01.

Home to Product

The redesign focused on creating a clutter-free and personalized app experience. It starts with a thematic homescreen which prioritizes search and specific call-to-actions, followed by a consistent navigation and simplified categories. The navigation flow is accompanied by auxiliary tidbits such as product availability and better pagination.

02.

Design Process

Understand & Relate
Started by empathizing with the end users to effectively understand the context and the human side of the story. Researched the current market for m-commerce solutions and real-world retail experiences.
Research & Analyze
Created user personas and stories by conducting in-person interviews with subject matter experts and current users. Managed to distill and analyze critical themes to drive select functionalities.
Prototype & Iterate
Tested and iterated all ideas through feedback sessions using interactive mobile prototypes. Hosted multiple educational workshops on modern mobile practices and design team structures for the Macy's team.
03.

Product Display Page

A systematically organized PDP with a focus on imagery, personalization and easy to understand product attributes. We incorporated a full-screen image gallery with embedded videos, indicators for in-store availability and smart suggestions of other complimenting products.

04.

Lists & Wedding Registery

After additional interviews with current Macy's users, we proposed to better incorporate the Wedding Registry into the exsiting lists framework. We improved these features by enabling concise interaction flows, contextual product suggestions and the ability to collaborate with friends or shopping assistants.

05.

Reimagining Bloomingdales

A brief case study of the Bloomingdales home screen and navigation flows. We introduced Look Books to the homescreen for the high-end and fashion conscious users. The result, an editorial approach to m-commerce where shoppers can be inspired and shop for individual items from an already styled outfit.

Conclusion

The design strategy and detailed documentation of high fidelity prototypes were well received by Macy's executive stakeholders. They commended us for taking a vague project brief and distilling it to specific action items and deliverables. We were subsequently engaged in the following stages of the project, inspiring an array of new functionalities within the product road-map for the upcoming releases.

Learnings

We started the project by conducting numerous stakeholder interviews with our client, which helped us understand the tensions among different teams and construct a better project scope. In hindsight, we should've better planned for backup resources to avoid delays in the project timeline. We also should've involved Macy's UX team in our early explorations to avoid repeating their tried-but-failed experiments.

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Platform: iPhone
Role: Lead Product Designer
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