Lowe's
Requirements Gathering
For this particular project, I played both the role of Product Designer and Product Manager. As a result, I heavily collaborated with business partners as well as product partners responsible for other tools within the same ecosystem to determine our scope of work. Below is a journey map I created during our kick-off workshop for the Promotional Pricing Signage workflow. This became a living document that I referenced and added to throughout my discovery process. During the session, we identified three overarching phases: Pre-planning, In-store Execution, and Customer Experience. My product specifically fell within the In-store Execution phase, but I captured information about the upstream and downstream systems so that I could later connect with those teams on dependencies and the flow of data.
User Validation
I shadowed users across several different stores to observe their promotional signage execution process. To do this, I followed a protocol that I helped establish for my broader UX team. I identified my local Lowe's stores, reached out to the store leadership via email or introduced myself in person, and then set up a cadence of weekly visits that did not interfere with high customer traffic or urgent store projects. My users in particular worked from 5am-2pm, but there were also overnight teams. What I learned during my field research for the Promotional Signage workflow was that our users were not consistently following the process as directed by business leadership. I validated many of the pain-points identified during the requirements gathering phase and was able to better assess the opportunities for enhancement that would yield the greatest improvement in the user experience. Because I was also the acting PM, at this phase I documented the necessary front-end and back-end user stories in Jira in partnership with the software engineer lead on my team.
Ideation
For initial concept testing with users and further validation with my engineering partners on feasibility estimation, I generated lo-fi wireframes. Concept testing was informal - I would often carry my laptop around the store and approach users that were not with customers and ask them to review the lo-fi wireframes. While I did not leverage a usability script for this phase, I kept detailed notes as the users provided feedback. For this project, I visited three different stores and spoke with 4-5 users per store. I made sure to speak with associates that ranged from new-hire to more tenured.
User Testing
I organized the promotional signage tasks the same way the signage packets were already being distributed - by department. Users will use the built-in scanner on their mobile Zebra device to check each sign into its indicated location. User testing was successful! Our assumption that users would be familiar with the item and location scanning was proven valid as they easily completed tasks in testing.
Requirements Gathering
In partnership with my Product Manager, I collected requirements from our business partners so that we could define the problem statements and identify metrics of success.
User Validation
I shadowed merchandising store managers to see how tasks were currently distributed - word of mouth and paper. I then measured the length of time it took for store associates to determine what task to work next.
Ideation
At the time, the app showed an icon with store associates' initials to track whoever had worked on a particular area of the store. I expanded upon these existing name icons and created variants so that they would indicate different statuses. This would be a reflection of tasks assigned by managers in an separate portal.
User Testing
Through testing, I discovered that users wanted the different icon variants defined within the app, so in our final iteration we spelled out the meaning of each status and associated icon within the task summary view.
Metrics After Release
Sales optimized task assignment yielded higher productivity and an associated increase in sales. The numbers below reflect data collected after the implementation of features that worked together to minimize mental load and streamline task completion.