Brown Thomas | Redesign

Background

Brown Thomas had undertaken a number of projects in 2017 to review & update the brand purpose and tone of voice by launching a digital magazine and a revamped loyalty program. The outcome of this work was a new confidence and ability to leverage the authority of the brand in communications with the customer. The existing digital products did not reflect this and as such a “redesign” project was initiated by the business.

The Challenge

The goal of the project was to create a visual language that mirrors the Brown Thomas brand proposition. By creating a design system we would be able to develop a single underlying system that unifies the user experience across all omnichannel touchpoints. This would give a solid but flexible foundation on which to build and expand.

The design system was only one of the deliverables though and not one to stimulate the visual mind of the stakeholders who would ultimately sign off on the project. Each existing page, element & feature would be touched while new features would be conceptualised.

The key goals of the project were:

• Increase engagement with content led shopping journeys.
• Be device friendly across mobile, tablet & desktop.
• To demonstrate authority and leadership in the Irish fashion & beauty industry.
• Improve metrics such as conversion, traffic & time on site.

With such a large project, we partnered with Onstate, a design agency based in Leeds, England who had worked with the business on the digital magazine creation and were familiar with the new direction.

My Role

I was the UX lead on the project team consisting of a Business Analyst, Project Manager, Technical Analyst and the Head of Product while on the agency side we had 2 Designers, a Project Manager and the Co-founders of the agency. I would be the point of contact for all design & front-end matters and collaborated closely with the designers at Onstate to capture requirements, create low-res wireframes and communicate feedback from stakeholders.

As part of the design process, I ran an almost daily briefing with stakeholders to present work in progress to ensure it was achieving the intended goals of the project and iterate quickly when needs be.

Once business approval was given to the visual direction of the project, I was involved in a number of discovery workshops with the internal team, Onstate and our SFCC development partner, Astound Commerce. In these sessions the visual design, core templates and journeys were reviewed and evaluated so that all changes made are detailed in the form of a BRD and from which development estimations could be provided.

In the development phase, I was responsible for creating the requirements to integrate the design system while also creating HTML/CSS prototypes to communicate the functionality of new features. I also assisted the QA team with approving releases and led the communication & education efforts with teams in the wider business to leverage the new features and design system.

The Results

Once the initial design phase had wrapped and the partnership with Onstate concluded, the project hit a number of roadblocks which ultimately resulted in a large descoping exercise. We were able to develop some key aspects that were identified as having the most impact for the user and the business in mid 2019.

Design system - colours, typography, grid, iconography, illustrations

Search suggestions enhancements

Stock, Loyalty & Share component for PDP

New mobile PLP filter functionality

New PLP template

New marketing content types

New PLP SEO component

The Takeaways

In this project I not only learned so much about design systems, I was also able to really practice and become comfortable presenting to and working with stakeholders of all levels and across departments. This taught me to also manage stakeholder engagement carefully. While I feel that on this project, the frequency of them could have been scaled back - a lot of focus and time can be lost discussing the colour of a button or revising already approved designs - I came out of this knowing how to refine my process and focus when engaging in the future.

This was also my first large scale project and while maintaining a close and sound relationship with our design agency partner, communication and timelines were not without their challenges.