Sears
Keeping up with the Market Trends

Evaluated the existing Sears app and redesigned it as per current market standards

My Role
Led Product Strategy,
Research Synthesis, and User interaction design.

Team
4 UX Designers

Project Timeline
3 Week Design Sprint

Tools
Figma, Airtable, Miro, Optimal Workshop, Google Sheets, Adobe creative suite.

Current Sears App

Background

Sears has been the largest retailer in the USA since the 1980s. But this giant is struggling to retain customers in the recent boom in online shopping trends.

How could we help Sears regain footing again?

Proposed Sears App

Goal

Bridging the gap between expectations of the current customer base and prospective customer base was crucial to this project.

Helped Sears better understand their customer base, to create a dynamic design with a focus on:

Customer preferences
Personalization and Rebranding
Customized shopping experience

Discover

The first step was to understand the user base:

What are users experiencing when they are shopping on the Sears app?
What are the challenges users are facing in the process from product discovery to checkout?
What is the main reason for a high bounce rate?
What might it take to retain new visitors and improve the conversion rate?
How does Sears's shopping experience compare to the competitors?

To find out answers to these questions I conducted

contextual inquiries to understand how people interact with the Sears website
user interviews with people who like to shop online.

The second step was to understand what users were looking for when shopping online.

39 people answered our survey that was conducted to understand user preferences and online shopping behaviors.

Market Research

Competitive Analysis

So the next step was to analyze the experience offered by the competition to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

DEFINE

The next step was to define the user base for this project.

Shopping lover:

Meet Emma!

Then I used various UX tools to synthesize and analyze our research findings.

The first one is the User Journey Map.

Let's look at what Emma is doing, what she’s thinking and feeling, throughout her shopping experience from product discovery to using the product.

The smileys on the graph show Emma's overall feeling at each stage, and the unhappy and fustrated ones highlighted opportunities for us - To improve Emma's experience especially when she is at her low points.

Service Blueprint:

Next, I looked at Emma’s journey map from the business perspective. Mapping of user touchpoints with support processes revealed missing service components.

What opportunities can be captured while I seek to improve Emma’s experience?

Casestudy Sears Service Blueprint (Copy).png

opportunities Service Blueprint (Copy).png

The main takeaway here is that - there is an opportunity to provide Emma with a personalized and enjoyable and modern shopping experience.

The feature to share the finds on Sears with each other will be useful in fostering a sense of community and will help with increasing and retaining our user base.

This user journey and service mapping helped me align the business goals and Emma’s goals. For this project, ensuring that Emma feels connected, and is able to enjoy her shopping experience is the goal and it will help us increase user engagement, increase conversion rate and ultimately gain more insights into user behavior.

That helped me define the main Problem Statement:

Emma needs a way to browse and compare trending items without getting overwhelmed, so that she can feel engaged with her shopping experience.

To provide the best solution possible I looked at multiple ways that we’d improve the experience for Emma.

How Might We

Make it easier/more exciting for Emma to compare products?
Make it easier for Emma to browse between categories and products?
Customize recommendations and searches to be more relevant to Emma’s search and purchase history?
Help Emma feel more socially connected so she feels more engaged when shopping?

Feature Prioritization (MoSCoW)

To align Emma's goals with business goals we needed to prioritize what features should be included in the first phase, to design an MVP with maximum value.

IDEATION

So, as I reflected on how we might address Emma’s needs and help transform the narrative from “What's going on here?” to “I love shopping at Sears!”

Visual Design

User interviews and contextual inquiries conducted at the start of the project made it clear that all of the customers still remember this older Sears logo. Many had memories and stories attached to the older times.

So I proposed the Monochromatic Sears Blue theme, it draws on the nostalgia people experience when they think about the good memories they had with Sears while growing up.

This color scheme will help project a more trustworthy company image to users.

Minimalistic design with maximum use of white space to reduce the feeling of clutter and showcase colorful products.

User Flow for Emma's shopping Task

Emma likes to have a personalized shopping experience and likes to compare items before purchasing. She needs to find a trendy coat for the upcoming winter. She compares a couple coat listings, buys one, gets it delivered, and writes a review.

Compare products feature

Personalization onboarding quiz

Now on to visualize Emma's streamlined shopping experience.

TESTING

Time to check if our design delivered!

We conducted usability tests with 5 people who were tasked with testing out Emma's scenarios based on her user flow.

Usability Test Results

Design Iterations

CONCLUSION

Project Takeaways

Sears is remembered fondly by many people and by understanding the changing needs of the online shoppers we were able to add to that, creating a usable, personalized, and engaging shopping experience.

Next Steps:

Continue to iterate design and testing to add features from the feature prioritization matrix
Collaborate with public figures to attract the younger generation
Pursue Partnerships with Sustainable Brands

Continue building an engaging app experience that will cater to each shoppers unique need while accommodating the various needs of diverse shoppers.

Sears Keeping up with the Market Trends