Contextual Messaging

Project Overview

This initiative aims at building a customer message application, that is tailored to the Farfetch platform use cases and architecture, provides full integration with Farfetch core services and channels, enabling them to deliver on their Trade & Loyalty strategy, as well as serving other tenants on the Farfetch platform.

My Role: UX Project Lead
Leading the direction of User Experience and Development Strategy, managing a small team of product designers, and working with Stakeholders and Product to take the project to completion.

Project Duration: July 2020 - expected launching date Dec 2021 (18 months)

Scope

The goal of the project is to provide business teams a complete toolkit to manage personalised messages to customers along their purchase journey on any Farfetch channel.

Building this application also allows Farfetch to phase out 3rd party technologies that are currently part of their marketing stack, but have long shown not having the desired feature set to serve the ever-growing sophistication of Farfetch use cases.

Usability Testings Sessions

When I began working on this project the design work for the MVP had already been created and engineers were already working on its implementation but I realised that very little or no research have been done during the design phase. I quickly planned and facilitated usability testing sessions with the stakeholders with the goal to establish any usability issues on the most common tasks of the tool.

The usability testing sessions surfaced many issues and some of them were critical and were considered blockers to the user as they weren't able to complete essential tasks in the tool.

Before we continued working on the visual design we had to fix the usability issues with the current design.

Design delivery

I'm managing a small team of product designers to deliver the Customer Messaging MVP.

Key challenges/learnings

There has been a struggle between UX team members and devs to work together. Before I joined the project developers and designers had been working in isolation.

I had to change this developer-led ways of working and adapt and approach things more collaborately.

At first the dev colleagues didn't seem very approachable at all. I tried to understand why they viewed design as a blocker for them and suggest a few changes to foster a more collaborative working practices between themand the uX team members.

Some of the things I introduced were: