currys rebirth

Summary

A complete redesign, as part of the replatform. Working closely with the team, a serious tidy up of years of clutter, with a brand new creative & style guide. Resulting in a more clean and modern front end.

Solution

Audit and identify the website's areas where we needed content controllable by CMS. Categorise them and create components.

The process

Define

Using Miro, we audited the website's page types and identified the areas where we needed content controllable by CMS.

Next, we categorised the different content types and created user stories on Jira for each component.

Ideate

We moved to ideate in Sketch, to establish the components structure and pinpointed which design elements we wanted our team to be able to modify in the CMS.

We used a Confluence page to keep track of the elements, and link back to the user stories.

Design

The designs for each component, including all variations, were made on Sketch. These were then uploaded to Zeplin for the developers.

Additionally, the designs were placed in a library, so we could quickly mock-up where and how they would be used across the site.

Build

The developers began building the designs, but with the tight deadline and a brand new team on board - I stepped in to help with guidance on HTML & CSS.

Test

Once the designs were in place, we completed the UAT testing, which included device and cross-browser testing.

Deliver

Over 7000 content items were migrated from an outdated in-house content management system, to a modern component-based CMS, Amplience.

Design iterations

To measure success about the latest designs, we used Adobe Target and with the assistance of the optimisation team, all data were gathered and analysed for all the iterations that followed.

What i’ve learned

Learning 1

Initially, the requirement was to only focus on the UI of the product. However, I knew that as a UX designer, my job is to advocate for the users and to coordinate the whole balanced team to come up with the best product designs.

After consulting my design manager and other senior designers for advice, I set up a meeting to explain the user-centered design process I hoped to follow. I proposed a timeline to make sure that the product can still be built within the time constraints, and explained why adding activities like interviews, brainstorming sessions, and user feedback would help the team fail fast and eventually build a better product that people would love using.

From this experience, I learned about how to advocate for design when necessary. It is important not to blindly stick to a "process", but to understand why different design activities help us build better products, and to convey the value of those activities to stakeholders and other team members.

Learning 2

It turned out that our developers were more than willing to sit with us during interviews/testings and synthesize with us afterwards. It was a win-win scenario because they were interested in hearing what the users of their products say, and their expertise in the product helped me capture a lot of important points from those sessions. We all had a better understanding of how each other work, and how to collaborate to make the product better.