Scope

The first step was defining the intent of the design effort. The scope here was to look at future experiences for shopping and user retention.

Phase 1: Empathize

Before starting any UI design efforts, I needed to empathize with current Macys customers. I conducted intercept encounters in a Macy’s store in order to observe and talk to users while they were in a relevant and natural environment.

I drafted a discussion guide that focused on three areas that were important to understand:

1. User behaviors and motivators

What’s important to them when they shop? How do they get dressed?

2. Current and competitor experience

What pain points do they have and how does it compare to competitors?

3. Inspiration and user’s ideal shopping experience

How do they get dressed? What inspires their shopping?

Phase 2: Define

I synthesized the data from the interviews and put together high patterning themes in order to uncover trends in shopping behavior and opportunities for design.

From the analysis I found that there were five salient groupings (“Themes”) that represented how users shop, what drives them to shop, and how they curate their own particular style.

Persona Development

In order to bring some of the synthesized insights to life, I created a focused persona. This would help bring clarify to future use cases and features.

Phase 3: Ideate

With the research and original project intent in mind, I created a few high level design goals to guide the visions of the features to be defined.