Case Study: A long-term relationship with Macy's.

Macy's and I began working together in 2005 on a tactical project for their website where they were seeing significant drop-off. For an e-commerce website, the words "significant drop-off" are scary, so this was a pretty important problem to solve. I worked closely with their team to understand the problem and design a solution that kept the business goal intact while solving the usability issues. They were impressed and we began a long, successful relationship together that helped:

• Increase conversion and revenue
• Increase awareness and practice of usability within the company
• Develop a better connection between site and store
• Create a more powerful shopping experience for customers

Evaluate the Existing Experience

I continued our relationship by taking an in-depth look at what was on Macys.com already. This is what is called an Expert Evaluation since it gives a best-practices and competitive assessment of the user experience. There was a lot of feedback — Macy's had been creating the site with merchants, project managers and developers. No one representing the user, not an uncommon situation. Business is represented, technology is represented, but oftentimes the user is only guessed about.

The review presented Macy's with a lot of opportunities to improve the customer experience, and a set of tactical and strategic recommendations to get there. They took it to heart — they loved their site and wanted it to be the best it could be, but no one had ever given them a complete assessment of the user experience. With the changes in place, they saw dramatic improvements in conversion, reduced drop-off, and fewer calls to the customer support line.

Make Checkout Better

The next big project we tackled together was the checkout process. It had significant issues that kept customers from actually purchasing the products they wanted. Checkout is a bad place to go wrong!

I started with an assessment that included both an Expert Review and a Usability Testing. This gave us a starting point to understand where the problems were and how best to attack them. I created several conceptual designs that turned into detailed designs, were tested with users, and finalized. The resulting design solved several pain points within the flow, significantly reduced calls, and walked the customer through a logical flow.

Give Customers More Power

Macy's sells a very large assortment of products. This presents somewhat of a difficult challenge when trying to create an easily navigable structure. For customers, even a robust information architecture was not enough. Navigating to "dresses", for example, still left a user with 27 pages of results. The solution: Faceted navigation.

Faceted navigation, sometimes called "faceted search", gives much more power to the user to narrow down content to meaningful results. Traditional navigation relies heavily on categorization and is fairly limited. A faceted structure, however, gives the user the option to narrow by not only category but any number of characteristics. For example, in an e-commerce environment, a user could filter by category, price, brand, size, color, fabric, country of origin, length of hemline ... and the list goes on. So instead of just looking at all the 27 pages of dresses, a user can look at all the red Calvin Klein dresses that are available in a size 6. Much more powerful!

Of course, designing an effective faceted navigation structure is not just about understanding the principle. There are a lot of nuances to understand and choices to be made: Use of technology, number of facets, allow multi-selection, controls to use for selection, etc. Because of this, I kicked off the Macy's project with a workshop. I introduced the principle and the breadth of options, and then we talked about what made the most sense for their users, their business goals and their technology expertise.

Throughout the process of design, prototyping, testing and documentation, the groundwork we laid in the Stakeholder Workshop led to a better design and a more efficient and effective design process. When released, Macy's faceted navigation will make their site not only more usable but more useful and powerful as well.

Connecting Site and Store

One of the more interesting projects I've done with Macy's connected the point-of-sale systems to Macys.com. When I started the project, I spent a fair amount of time in stores talking to associates about their jobs, their experience with the current POS, and their relationship with Macys.com. I found that many of them thought of Macys.com as a competitor because they lacked access to it, and that their computer savvy was much lower than anyone had expected.

With that knowledge and understanding in hand, I work with a broad Macy's team to create, evaluate, test and document a design that gave associates access to the Macys.com assortment, was appropriate to a keyboard-centric POS environment, and was easy to learn. The end results was incredibly well received by both associates and the business, far exceeding the expectations.

Thinking Not Just About "Can Do" But "Will Do"

The most recent project with Macy's has taken us in a whole new direction. Much of the practice of user experience is focussed on usability, making sure a user can accomplish a task. But for many businesses, it's not just about making it easy, it's also about making it persuasive.

I have to admit, this is new territory for me. It's very different from traditional usability, focussed almost entirely in the "emotional brain" rather than the "rational brain". I'm still learning the many nuances. But I find the principle fascinating and would love to discuss the idea with you.

For this project, collaborated with persuasion experts to conduct the research and provide the findings. My role was primarily to provide context and help bridge the gap between usability and persuasion. I'm good at what I do but I also know when to bring in specialists, whether it be an amazing visual designer, a hot shot programmer or a cutting edge persuasion expert.