B2C
Debenhams
Debenhams was a British department store chain founded in 1778, known for selling fashion, beauty, and home products. After facing financial difficulties, it went into administration in 2020 and closed all its physical stores. The brand was later bought by Boohoo and relaunched as an online-only store.
Client
Platform
🖥️ 📱 Responsive Design
Role
Leading the end-to-end product design (Research | UX | UI)
2019-2020
What our client wanted
As Debenhams planned to close 50 stores, the company aimed to introduce a Pick Up Drop Off (PUDO) service to offer customers more convenient options for order collection and returns. This initiative was intended to minimize disruptions in areas losing stores and maintain customer engagement.
The PUDO service was also projected to generate an additional £10 million in annual revenue.
Data Gathering for Debenhams’ PUDO Initiative
To ensure the success of Debenhams' Pick Up Drop Off (PUDO) service, we started by gaining a deep understanding of the target market. We did a secondary data analysis of the latest data and customer insights to uncover key patterns in user behaviour, pain points, and preferences. Here’s what the data revealed:
1. Delivery Options: 55% of shoppers abandoned their carts due to unsatisfactory delivery options, highlighting a major weakness in the current setup.
2. Checkout Problems: The online checkout process had significant issues, negatively impacting conversion rates.
3. Customer Complaints: Delivery was the largest source of customer complaints, emphasising the need for more flexible options.
4. Confusing Proposition: The current delivery system allowed drop-offs at ParcelShops but lacked a collection option, causing customer confusion.
5. Store Closures: With 50 stores closing, the Click & Collect service would be significantly impacted, making a flexible PUDO solution essential.
Understanding the Problem
To fully understand the business goals, objectives, and KPIs, as well as the pain points of both customers and the business, we facilitated a workshop with key project stakeholders, including Product Owners, Developers, Analytics, and Business Analysts.
During the workshop, we analysed the existing technology stack and user flow in detail. By uncovering data-driven insights, customer frustrations, and technical limitations, we were able to map out the issues and plan the next steps to move the project forward efficiently.
Competitor Comparison
After identifying the issues impacting Debenhams’ customer experience, we conducted competitor research to see how others in the market were addressing similar challenges. This comparison revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of direct competitors' approaches to delivery options and customer satisfaction. These insights helped inspire new solutions that would better meet the needs of Debenhams’ customers, while also positioning the business to compete more effectively in the market.
Customer Experience Map
With pre-existing personas and extensive user research already in place, I began creating a customer experience map to visually highlight both customer and business pain points, as well as areas for improvement. This map became a central resource, capturing the entire customer journey and pinpointing key touch-points that needed attention.
It served as the "source of truth" during the design phase, providing a reference point to ensure all design decisions aligned with improving the customer experience and addressing identified issues.
User Journey
After gaining a clear understanding of the problem, business requirements, customer insights, and the outcome of competitor analysis, we began translating the gathered insight into conceptual ideas.
Once the key scenarios were defined in collaboration with the business analyst, we created an end-to-end user journey map.
During this process, instead of solely focusing on the checkout and delivery user journeys, we took a step back and adopted a holistic approach. we examined the entire user journey—from the moment the customer lands on the website through to checkout. This broader perspective allowed us to identify several opportunities to enhance the overall customer experience.
We documented these recommendations in a separate deck and reviewed them with the relevant Product Owners and Analytics teams. Together, we validated, sized, and prioritized the opportunities. As a result, the POs adjusted their roadmaps, enabling the planning and development of designs in Maxymiser for live customer testing to begin.
COMMS Experience
To ensure the communications experience remained consistent with the Debenhams store collection journey, we conducted multiple workshops with the project lead PO, Business Analysts, and the Comms team. These sessions focused on capturing existing scenarios and understanding technical limitations.
This collaborative effort enabled us to accurately map out the ideal content structure we wanted to communicate to customers, ensuring clarity and consistency throughout the experience.
Wireframes
Responsive web app (🖥️📱)
Created end-to-end scenario-based wireframes
UI Designs
Responsive web app (🖥️📱)
Created page by page scenario-based UI Design
Usability Testing
During the design phase (wireframe and later UI design creation) we planned and conducted a various usability testing sessions in labs with a range of customers who had shopped with Debenhams before and ones who had not.
We developed high fidelity clickable wireframes as this helped to resemble the final product to gain more accurate feedback from users as well as the development team who were rapidly developing code using an agile approach.
We thoroughly usability tested and iterated upon with close to 5 rounds of testing over 4 months.
Measuring Success and Tracking Performance
To ensure that the app not only functions efficiently but also contributes to operational improvements and business growth, together with the Analytic lead we defined a set of metrics to track the app’s performance.
Launch
🦠 COVID-19 Outbreak 🦠
Due to the unexpected outbreak of the virus, the project had to be put on hold, and we were unable to move forward as planned.
Sadly, shortly after this, the company went into administration, and our project with Debenhams came to an end.