Modern Greetings
Case Study: Digital Transformation and the Modern Greetings Experience
Personalizing cards in a new way to meet the digital demand and consumers’ needs. Finding the right balance of ease and personalization and defining what to build. I needed to prioritize and simplify what we were going to build for launch. Lead product design and future roadmap. Oversee and delegate final designs. Results gained confidence in the Lean UX with Agile’s Scrum Methodology and our team. I learned gaining influence and a backbone is essential for project success. ## Outcome
Successful launch of a new site experience focused on modernizing the online greeting card shopping and sending experience; technical platform and online service for sending greetings cards online that drove increased sales, positive consumer feedback, and new partnership opportunities with customers.
Try it out for yourself
Problem to solve:
Enable an on-the-go connector, to create & send, a personalized Hallmark Card.
User goals:
- Make it more convenient and feel more personal to send a card
- Save me time
- Help me add a personal touch without sacrificing ease of use.
Business goals:
- Create a fun experience to engage younger consumers
- Reduce cost, increase revenue
- Remove barriers to card category
- Remove technical constraints and tech debt, with a new progressive web application (PWA)
My Responsibility - Experience Design Leadership
- Partnering with the UX Director, to help create alignment on the vision across key leaders through a series of design workshops and ongoing conversations across all levels of the enterprise.
- Lead the vision, product strategy, design, and drive cross-functional alignment.
- Collaborating with development partners to build the technology needed to support the vision.
- Led discovery of the right thing to build for the consumer, to the way in which to build the experience, with product teams and stakeholders.
- Gain alignment and trust in human-centered methodologies.
- Led a large team with design thinking, data and within an Agile framework.
My greatest success, was bringing the whole cross-functional team along the journey, to build a product people want to use.
Final Design preview
Modernizing the Online Card Shopping Experience
Now that you saw the final product, let’s see how the sausage was made.
The Digital Transformation Journey begins with understanding, and empathizing with our customers.
I created company-wide personas, and directed the product strategy
- I saw the need for a holistic strategy company-wide.
- I defined the product strategy through a human-centered lens.
- Personas became key for strategic, consumer-centric decisions for this project and company-wide.
- Next, I applied personas to products.
Applying personas to products
Deep insights of the user’s needs, goals, motivations, not only helped to identify what to build, but also how to build it.
User insights and data-guided me throughout the journey of the project life-cycle in ideation sessions, technical discussions, etc. as a critical decision-making tool.
Bringing usability considerations, into requirements.
Next, define the problem and drive alignment with research, data, and insights.
Our stakeholders had a LONG wish list which didn't equal working in Agile. Instead of developing in a big bang, my job was to help coach our business stakeholders on Agile principles and benefits and drill back the scope into what were the highest priorities first.
I danced between creating test plans, synthesizing results, and sharing insights to ultimately drive alignment on a lean MVP.
Drive alignment by triangulating data. Align on mvp with competitive competitive audit, stakeholder ranking and customer survey data to align on MVP.
Activity:
- Competitive audit
- Quantitative user survey
- Stakeholder ranking
Outcome:
- Aligned MVP and phased plan
- Work in Agile
- Create focused work and maximize the experience
- Mitigating risks associated with launching a new site through the creation and execution of a phased launch plan
- Developing a plan to measure the consumer experience leveraging quantitative and qualitative data shared on a regular cadence
I facilitated working sessions to gather requirement, and align with cross-functional teams to bring into ideation.
Artifact of building requirements
Cross-functionally, generating ideas with crazy eights
Anyone will tell you whiteboard sessions are my favorite. The best ideas come from groups of people, not heroes.
Artifact - Crazy 8's workshop
The aim of the crazy eights workshop, is to gather input from key stakeholders on how a new idea or design concept could work for the customers they understand best.
Collectively, everyone listens to each others ideas and is invited to vote on a favorite choice.
This approach helped me, and the designers know to collaborate together, and make shared and informed decisions about the direction a design concept should take.
Taking favorite concepts further, with low-fidelity sketches
Once our Crazy 8’s session wrapped, I collected the group’s favorite ideas and flushed them out further. I worked ideas forward and backward, as a user would, to find any potential roadblocks or confusion.
Hi-fidelity designs, gaining user feedback, and iterating
I broke out the ideation, prototyping, and testing into focused sections of the flow. I broke down the work into sprints, regularly shared sprint updates with cross-functional teams and executives.
First, we did deep dives into the core functionality before building complexity.
My Role:
- Sprint planning for myself, and designers
- Create user-test plans, listen to users, synthesize results
- Share actionable next steps
- Ideate and prototype individually, and mentor/delegate
- Facilitated design reviews and working sessions
- Created shareouts for product teams, stakeholders, and executives
Usertesting settled internal debates, and helped define the desired experience.
- I used user testing to settle internal debates stakeholders wanted more color options than customers.
- While stakeholders still wanted more color choices than users, we found a compromise in the middle.
- I used interaction design, to reduce overwhelm, and eliminated colors with accessibility issues.
Differentiator - Upload your handwritten message. Take a picture of your own handwriting and upload it to send to your recipient. We found this feature is our differentiator which surprised stakeholders.
Internally, it was old news. But to our users, this stole the show.
Leadership hearing users’ surprise and delight helped them realize we had more than enough excitement to launch with the lean MVP.
Preview your card
An easy way to double-check your work and flip through the card before checking out. It was also critical because we have a mixed cart between the old and new sites.
Highlights of my contributions to advocate for the user:
- Character count
- Save feature
- Accessibility controls
- Defining the need for filters
- Limiting choice to only what the user wants, and eliminating overwhelm
The above features and experiences, were NOT originally on the MVP roadmap. I ensured they were included for the best user experience.
Gaining feedback in Beta.
Our goal was to understand what needs to be fixed prior to launch:
- I helped to draft scenarios for internal teams to test and gain feedback.
- The UX team and I, gathered and synthesized feedback into themes.
- We prioritized issues based on impact to user.
- Then, we had rapid ideation and development working sessions to work through what’s desired, and what’s feasible.
In this case, we were testing the quality and ability to adjust a photo of a handwritten message. It was not passing our customer’s quality or ease.
I brought two options to the table where we talked about feasibility, pros and cons, and risks associated with either approach.
Sadly, when reviewing the feature recently, it looks like this iteration hasn’t made it live yet. Launch the filters feature!
What did our customers say?
Usertesting participants shared that 98% extremely satisfied with the level of personalization/ease:
- usability
- add/edit/filter a photo
- add a message
Summary of goals and achievements
By using Design Thinking/Agile Methodology, I was able to help the user and business achieve their goals so we all win in the end.
Business wins:
- define the right thing to build for our users and business
- save the company time and money
- create a desirable, usable, product
- define our differenciator
Customer wins:
Make it easy for customers to personalize a card and send it directly to the recipient.
Product team wins:
- Returning to Agile/Lean UX
- Simplified MVP so that we were empowered to launch quicker, reduce the risk of tech and UX debt
- Confidence that we were building the right product, the right way
UX leadership wins
- Trust in our UX team and a seat at the table for strategy going forward
- Leadership & Influence
Conclusion
This project was a full transformation.
I transformed not only the roadmap and experience, but also the way we were working, thinking, collaborating, and communicating.
Through the discovery of the right thing to build for the consumer, to the way in which to build it with product teams our team finally realized how it should feel for the consumer to use the product.
- I helped gain alignment and trust in human-centered methodologies.
- I learned how to lead a large team with user-centered data, design thinking and agile methodologies.
- I grew a backbone and wore my “advocates for user” badge proudly as we blazed the trail toward innovation.
