Online Merchandising Tooling - UX Strategy & Vision

Project Overview

An initiative aimed to build a strategy for migrating all VM tools used on Farfetch out of our legacy systems and improve visual merchandising.

This phase of the project involved to:

  • Understand the workflows, challenges and ambitions of users of curation tools on the platform.
  • Evaluate opportunities against user journeys and pain points that will support the scaling and automation of curation.
  • Present the vision and strategy for future curation tooling

My Role: UX Principal Designer

Project Duration:Oct-Dec 2019 (3 months)

Problems

When I was brought in to the project Farfetch had multiple merchandising tools being used and maintained across the business which didn't meet the current and future needs of curators. These tools were built on outdated technology, incurring high maintenance costs as well as being very manual and inefficient to use, therefore blocking scaling our curation for customers.

Curation at Farfetch across all product listings was very manual and limited meaning they were unable to increase their merchandising reach to a range of customer personas and brand cohorts, couldn't localise curation to provide relevant products based on local trends/styles or scale volume and relevancy of curated products.

Exploring user needs

Before committing to build a new tool, we embarked on a Discovery Research phase to help us understand the problem/s that needed to be solved.

This meant learning about our users and what they're trying to achieve, any chanllenges facing because of technology and opportunities to improve tools and merchandising service offered to boutiques.

I planned and facilitated user research sessions with the business groups (Visual merchandisers, Private client team, SEO team and Editorial team) who use curation tools to build edits and merchandise PLPs for customers, top clients, search engines and communities edits.

Ideation workshops

With all the research findings in hand, it was time for exploration of possible directions. The Product Owner and myself planned and facilitated Ideation workshops with the relevant stakeholder groups to evaluate opportunities against user journeys and painpoints. We got the team do collaborative sketching so they can participate in the creative process. We shaped a number of solutions around the problems our users had using the merchandising tools.

Discovery | Deliverables

The Discovery phase involved researching the problem space, framing the problems to be solved, and gathering enough evidence and initial direction on what to do next.

A few key deliverables produced included personas, as-is and to-be user journeys, user-needs statements.

Vision & Strategy

At the end of this discovery phase we had a well-defined a Vision and Strategy for Farfetch visual merchandising tooling which was socialised across the Business. At this point we also provided a roadmap showing a timeline for executing the strategy, and the building blocks/areas of focus for the tool.

The project got approval and we started working on its implementation in March 2020.

Challenges & Learnings

A key learning on this project was to involve the relevant stakeholders in the research planning so they have co-ownership of the research. We had stakeholders spread across different regions and when I planned the user research we assumed that the various local teams had the same needs than the UK team but that wasn't the case.

VIEW FULL CASE STUDY - Building the MVP