The Outcome

An app was created as an initial pilot to be tested in select markets. The delivered work secured Phase II of the project to reimagine the holistic purchase experience for the Flooring department.

THE BRIEF

Design a simpler, more approachable carpet-buying experience for online customers

THE OUTCOME

A digital experience that brought clarity to pricing and helped customers intuitively identify the right product with minimal staff guidance

Carpet-buying Needs to be More Human

The Challenge

The client is a leading home improvement retailer in the US. During the pandemic, they sensed that something was changing — the online sales for carpets went through the roof. The client speculated that customers are now ready to buy carpets completely digitally, and they want to capture this shift by offering a “frictionless” experience.

FROM THE END-USER POV

Imagine you have just built your new home.

You don’t know much about carpets. Naturally, you start doing some Google searches. You click on a retailer’s product page.

Suddenly, you’re faced with 582 options. Brands you’ve never heard of. All sorts of price points, pile heights, texture — and the worst part, 20 shades of beige.

So, you decide to visit a physical store. You become even more frustrated because there is even less information and the store clerk doesn’t know how to help you.

Customer Archetyping and Journey Mapping

KEY MOMENT #1

Uncovering real needs and reframing problems

The project team faced an uphill battle from the beginning because of incorrect pre-project scoping, underestimating the complexity and time required for the Discovery phase.

As we conducted consumer research, stakeholder interviews, and client workshops, we were grappling with doubts about the client’s core assumptions on customer needs. For example, counter to the client's belief, we found that customers do not follow a linear journey. They don’t go from step 1 to step 5. In fact, they might start at step 3, go to step 1, then end at step 5. At the same time, they might jump between in-store and online channels along the journey.

Further digging revealed that we had to reframe the project brief. We realized that a simple UX redesign (original scope) will not allow the client to alleviate the painpoints of customers. We had to look beyond and consider changes that may have a significant impact at the operation level.

To develop a system-level view, we investigated every actor along the purchase journey through one-on-one conversation (e.g. in-home measurement department, merchandising team, or third-party installers) and understand the challenges at each customer touchpoint. Every conversation was grounded in understanding one core question — how might we provide a simple and intuitive carpet-buying experience?

HOW I HELPED THE TEAM

Built a knowledge base to organize data from multiple sources (e.g. customer research, client documents, competitive research, and industry scan) to help the team digest a large amount of information in a short amount of time
Developed a set of insights that bring together customer needs to business goals, help forming the team’s foundational thinking
Created a set of hypotheses for the team to validate as we conducted stakeholder and customer interviews

KEY MOMENT #2

Navigating Chaos: from information overload to clarity

HOW I HELPED THE TEAM

We were drowning in information. We were still “getting smart” about key users and client’s business after three weeks — one week past the original timeline. The knowledge base I created and maintained could not keep up with the incoming flow of information. At the same time, we were pulled in various directions by different client stakeholders who had competing priorities.

Under intense pressure from the client side, we had to begin the design process without real clarity and established personas. We made a contentious decision to develop the personas and the final solution in parallel.

Synthesizing our learnings, I developed a set of guiding questions to help the design team think through key user problems we want to address. They point to four different areas of user needs:

Allowing customers to begin their purchase journey from any touchpoint while tracking their preferences (e.g. in-store associates, product-info page, home page, etc.)
Enabling customers to know how much they will pay up-front, with no hidden fees or surprise cost increase
Allowing customers to jump freely between in-store and online channels as they explore and shop
Allowing customers to begin their purchase journey from any touchpoint while tracking their preferences (e.g. in-store associates, product-info page, home page, etc.)

The design team moved forward and developed a “ballpark” design that could be further refined once we established the personas.

Recognizing the ambiguity we were in, I took the initiative to create a “single-source-of-truth” document that synthesized existing data into a one-pager of focus areas supported by user quotes, client data, and industry signals, enabling the team to navigate the design and ideation process
To help jumpstart the design process without specific personas, I synthesized our analysis into four guiding questions grounded in core needs:

How might we help customers self-qualify in theconsideration phase, or enable in-store associates to help qualify customers into specific products?

Customers go back and forth, and flex between online and offline. How might we provide a choose-your-own-adventure experience, that can customers wherever their starting point is in the buying journey?

How might we address the price transparency that all customers are very frustrated by?

How might we help customers feel more confident by providing with the right amount of information and support at the right time?

KEY MOMENT #3

Identifying High-Priority Feature Sets to Establish Competitive Edge

Faced with the project budget constraints and the client’s operational barriers, we had to identify features that we would fully build out for our final solution. We prioritized based on five factors:

Reach: the size of customers this problem is impacting
Bang for Buck: how deep is the pain caused by this problem?
User Segment: how valuable is this for the most important customer segment?
Level of Effort: how difficult is it to build for the client?
Strategic Alignment: how well does it strengthen the client’s strategy?

In short, based on user interviews and internal client data, features related to Price Transparency and Curation were prioritized as these are the most painful issues affecting the highest percentage of customers (especially the Budget-seeker archetype, the core customer segment for the client).

Furthermore, solving these two focus areas will allow the client to gain a first-mover advantage in addressing a key gap in the market — enabling the client to secure and further expand its customer base. Recognizing the importance of solving Channel Flexing and Choose-your-own-adventure in the long term, the final solution included features that can be scaled up to solve those areas of need.

HOW I HELPED THE TEAM

My closeness to the research and deep understanding of both consumer and business needs established my informal authority as the team’s “knowledge master,” positioning me as a valuable partner for designers in iterating the final solution and enabling me to ensure every design decision was backed by evidence
Collaborated with team members to prioritize top areas of user needs to solve based on user feedback and cross-referencing internal client data
I provided the strategic perspective during our prioritization process and built the business case for prioritizing Price Transparency and Curation:

Though Channel Flexing and Choose-your-own-adventure remain important painpoints for all customer segments, these features would not be a primary source of competitive advantage for the client. At the same time, implementing them has an operational impact that would require substantial time and resources (i.e. in-store associate training, organizational restructuring, connecting IT systems across subsidiaries and third parties, etc.)

When analyzing at the industry level, Price Transparency and Curation remain the biggest problems that no competitors were able to solve — being the first to solve them will give client a significant first-mover advantage.

When analyzing from an opportunity cost perspective (measured by the loss of existing customers), the cost of deprioritizing Channel Flexing and Choose Your Own Adventure is low. The client competes primarily on “widest selection, lowest price” — this value proposition is what appeals most to almost all of the client's customer base. In the short term, the majority of current customers would likely be willing to endure a reasonable amount of pain to find the right product (if Curation is implemented successfully) — which would buy the client time to tackle the operational constraints of Channel Flexing and Choose Your Own Adventure.

However, I did advise that these two deprioritized areas are crucial in the long-term — especially when specialty/mom-and-pop stores had been slowly stealing away customers by offering a “handholding experience” to navigate the complexity and overwhelmingness in buying carpets. Channel Flexing and Choose Your Own Adventure will strengthen the intuitive experience and reinforce the moat for the client’s carpet business, making it difficult for competitors to steal market shares.

More Work

Re-igniting Physical Play in the Digital Era