Online Merchandising Tooling - Building the MVP

Project Overview

Initiative to build a platform enabled curation tool, allowing curators to leverage their expertise against fashion taxonomy, performance and customer data to scale curation and improve product and content discovery.

In this project I executed the UX vision and strategy for Farfetch curation tools I worked on previously.

My Role: UX Principal Designer

Project Duration: March 2020-September 2021 (18 months)

Scope & Phases

To ensure this initiative solved not only the current needs but provided a framework to build on for the future of the platform we had broken it into managable pieces. Each phase required stakeholders and input from different business units as well as other initiatives in Farfetch.

Phase 1 we delivered a newly redesigned tool using the platform design system as well as ensuring feature parity with what we support today.

Phase 2 we well transitioning curators towards a more automated way of working to allow scale of curation.

Design/review/test

For the design phase, I started my design explorations by sketching ideas and creating lo-fi wireframes while reviewing the design concepts with the Product manager, engineers and a small group of stakeholders

Design concepts went a few review rounds before I created the structure and content for the new merchandisign tool as well as wireframing and prototyping the winning ideas to get feedback again from the Product manager, stakeholders and engineers.

Development & Delivery

During the development of the new tool the core team decided to set up weekly refinement sessions to define and go in depth over the Stories to be implemented. These refinement sessions between Tech, Product and myself (Design) helped me to produce final artifacts and specs to enable the engineers to implement the UI efficiently.

The engineering handoff I provided of the final UI was a mix of docs, prototypes showing the tool interactions and specs created in Figma.

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Rollout plan

Once the tool was ready to be released I defined a rollout out plan in collaboration with the Product Manager to ensure the smooth and successful testing, training and roll-out of the new merchandising tool.

Within the rollout plan I planned and facilitated a pilot Testing session with the relevant user groups to identify and highlight any issues that could have the most potential to impact many users, and should be considered before the launch.

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Onboarding & Training

Before the product launch the Product Owner and myself also enbarked on an onboarding and training phase where we created some training guides with short videos for the most common tasks of the Merchandising tool as well as having onlince training sessions.

Since our users are located in different zones, we planned the sessions by Zone as well as by user profile. In total we did a 2hr training sessions for over 200+ users across the UK, Russia, Middle East, Brazil & China.

Challenges & Learnings

Biggest challenge was creating, building and working with our Design System.

One of the issues I had was the lack of complex/advanced components of our B2B Design System to cover the needs of the product I was designing and this slowed down the design process as these extra components had to be spec from scratch.

It was also a struggle to create a sense of alignment and shared ownership for the developers in my project to be involved in the development of new components.

A key learning was also to take feedback from an early stage and include multiple disciplinary stakeholders in the feedback meetings.