Walmart

the challenge

Because of an extremely tight time crunch, Walmart was attempting to rebrand and implement an entirely new design system for their ecommerce platform without conducting any type of heuristic evaluation (putting the proverbial cart before the horse).

the solution

SapientRazorfish was asked to assist with a retroactive UX evaluation, providing quick wins to improve the experience. We then teamed up with Walmart’s product managers and designers applying this new design direction across multiple channels.

my role

Lead Information Architect / Art Director

Phase 1 - Site audit & site map

We started by conducting a site audit to identify specific pages that could be templatized. In addition to auditing the main website, we identified 16 micro-sites that would also need to be redesigned.

Phase 2 - UX analysis

From there we conducted a soft analysis of the current state of "search", "category pages", "item pages" and "checkout flows", and recommended a variety of enhancements to improve the experience.

Below are a set of considerations for conversations with the Walmart Checkout team.
LIST CREATION
Consider making list creation tools more prominent with CTAs, tool tips and/or helper text.
SOCIAL PROOFING
Reveal Q&A on high and low consideration items. Value: alleviates purchasing anxieties builds trust in brand, addresses unanticipated questions, encourages engagement. Other considerations: FAQs and video instructions.
RELATED ITEMS/CROSS SELLING
A/B test on bundled and non-bundled format on item page. Non-bundled format gives the user more freedom to choose.
Other options: provide related items on checkout page or in confirmation email.
RELATED ITEMS/CROSS SELLING
Offer special discounts if user buys complimentary items to an item user is considering. This adds additional value to users’ purchase.
OUT OF STOCK ITEMS
Prevent UX dead ends by allowing users to purchase temporarily out of stock items. “Notify when in stock” and “Save to wishlist” have proven to be insufficient strategies.
CHECKOUT CART
Consider more explicit CTA in checkout flow.  Instead of Continue, try Enter Payment etc…
CHECKOUT CART
Consider highlighting any product list items already in the user’s cart. Users need the ability to immediately identify the already-chosen product(s) so they can proceed to the task of finding and evaluating additional items.
CHECKOUT CART
Consider removing search and other elements that can distract from checkout flow.

Phase 3- Design implementation

During the implementation phase, the Walmart design team redesigned the main navigation without labels, and tucked the hamburger functionality into the Walmart logo. Without the hamburger, I was concerned their customers would not know how to navigate to different departments. I solved this by designing a couple of solutions that revealed the hamburger and labels while still honoring the new designs. The first of the two is close to where Walmart finally landed.

Phase 4- Email ecosystem redesign

The last task was to apply the new design to their email system.  In the process, we discovered that their current email framework was archaic and somewhat broken.  The emails were not responsive and relied far too heavily on images which, with some email clients, did not display instantly. We redesigned the existing templates into components that could be used as building blocks for a new responsive email system.  This  system was efficient, flexible and could easily serve any business unit.

Components
Configurations
Combinations
Two of Several Final Design
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