Redesign of the Merchandising Sorting System for Nike
I was brought in by the Nike Assort\\Visual team to pair on a complete redesign of product distribution tool. This tool is used by Nike employees all over the world to choose products that will live on their shelves each season.
Challenge
The previous iteration of the A\\V platform, its v2, was designed without consulting users to determine their needs and was such a poor experience that users had abandoned it in every market and reverted to the previous version in protest. Before Nike created the A\\V software, their product distribution teams had used PowerPoint to organize their thoughts so A\\V 2 had just been a copy of that experience completely. This left a lot to be desired in terms of the experience. Product thumbnails could be dragged into the canvas, but there was no way to attach relevant product details for context. In order to share and distribute product selections downstream, users had to copy a document and rename it. Users’ workspaces were cluttered with irrelevant files. Users had to develop their own systems for organizing and visualizing products, and products were divorced from context unless users typed product details on the canvas by hand.
Approach
The A\\V team brought in a UX Researcher to consult with SMEs in workshops where they observed how their users sorted products for distribution. The UX researcher was able to define problems and draft personas, but the team realized they needed a UX designer to take those findings and distill them into a usable product.
I paired with another senior UX designer and together we combed through hours of research footage to map out a list of user stories to represent the core tasks and needs of our users. We used those as our north star as we rapidly drafted wireframes for the various site architecture possibilities. Working in paper prototyping, we were able to quickly discuss and refine a broad variety of concepts before settling on one or two that showed potential.
We created wireframes and prototypes to test and refine our assumptions and observations with our SMEs until we arrived at the final product.
Our approach evolved the design metaphor from a PowerPoint style tool to an e-commerce tool where users can tag products to go into their pre-defined buckets. The buckets can be anything the users want them to be; because each market had unique product needs, this allowed for the greater flexibility that Nike worldwide employees demanded.
Users are able to filter products by a series of attributes, tagging products for potential categorization.
Users are also able to collaborate by sharing their workspaces with their co-workers.
Files
As this project is still under NDA, please feel free to contact me for more examples of work for this project.
