The project was about how to reconnect the customers with the new Argos brand while allowing customers to have more control and visibility over their shopping experiences.
Introducing new branding to reconnect with customers while giving them more control and visibility over their shopping experience.
At the beginning of the project, I partnered with three project managers for each digital platform (iOS, Android and Web) and one lead designer to uncover customer insights via user testing. This included setting up an in-house user testing lab and carrying out moderated tests with customers.
Performed ad-hoc guerilla testing with store colleagues and customers in-store. I was also invited to the wider company user testing sessions to understand customer’s shopping behaviour. Afterwards, I translated the findings into concepts and visual journeys that would allow us to address certain customer behaviours and motivations as part of the shopping journey.
One of my responsibilities was to create design frameworks such as style guides and prototypes to share the design vision, the design principles and the content strategy within the design team. The result of this enabled the team to convert ideas into visuals easily, gained brand consistency across the range of design projects in progress and drove faster decision-making for the POs by visualising the concept more quickly.
As I oversaw the design development across the iOS, Android and web platforms, it enabled me to share my design thinking and mentor other designers and PMs who would work on those specific platforms, and supported them in translating the product requirements based on each platform’s needs.
I produced journey maps for all the key customer journeys first, then turned them into wireframes to explore the experiences, and translated them into design to fine-tune the details.
I would then set up regular design huddles to review the design together as a team and capture any feedback from the POs and from the delivery team for any technical issues.
This process would repeat accordingly and in the end, based on the design requirements I would create prototypes of the journeys to guide the interaction along with a design specification document to share with the wider key stakeholders within the business.
I designed and presented works to gain buy-in from executives, senior stakeholders and many other Argos teams throughout the project lifecycle.
Examples of some final designs for various projects across iOS and Android.
The result was a real success for Argos. The newly introduced digital browser in the selected stores replaced the traditional catalogs and as a result, upgraded their in-store user experience to digital and delivered faster shopping experiences for customers. This also enabled faster Click-and-Collect and FastTrack services for self-serve customers so customers could get their ordered products more quickly even during busy festive periods.
All the digital channels received a massive revamp in terms of the UX and UI improvements including the homepage, header, footer, product listing pages, product detail pages and the checkout journey. Other new exciting features were introduced or in beta tests such as geo-location notifications, personalised shopping experience, predictive search across all the platforms and navigation reprioritisation. Finally, a new self-serve service called FastTrack was also introduced that could allow customers to pick up an order in as little as 60 seconds.
As a result, Argos became the first multi-channel UK retailer to surpass £1bn in mobile sales, 55% of the sales came from digital businesses and the online channels received more than 850 million customers visited in that year.
