Project
Dicks Sporting Goods
To create a new Product Release Experience for the Dick’s Sporting Goods (DSG) app, which will bring DSG into a new light and be seen as a contender in the Sneakerhead space.
Info
Role
UI/UX Designer
Tools
Figma, FigmaJam, Slack, MS Teams, Adobe XD, Miro, POP, Pen & Paper
My Responsibilties
Research & Survey
Competitive Analysis
Wireframes
Prototypes
Animation
Goal
End Result
Final Application Design & Solution
The high-fidelity mock-ups created using Walmart’s existing design system, our assets, and usability testing results.
RESEARCH
User Interviews
Exploratory research to glean insights into a sneakerhead’s mindset.
Develop preliminary personas/archetypes
Gain knowledge to utilize for the direction we’d like to take for the Product Launch experience within the DSG app.
We synthesized all of the insights gleaned by affinity mapping to see what common themes came to light.
STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS
Conducted stakeholder interviews to grasp a better understanding of where leadership, business, engineers, marketing, and others were looking to ‘take’ this new experience.
We also wanted to understand Business and Tech requirements.
We gathered all insights and synthesized them to glean common themes from our stakeholders.
From this, we put together our initial product vision/mission statement and defined the opportunity space
COMPETITIVE/COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
We conducted some competitive research to level-set and have an understanding of what other companies were currently doing in the same/similar space
HEURISTIC EVALUATION
Used the heuristic evaluation as an inspection method for to help to identify usability problems in the UI Design. It specifically involves evaluators examining the interface and judging its compliance with recognized usability principles (the "heuristics").
DESIGN CONCEPTS
We conducted a workshop with folks from Business, Marketing, Engineering, Product, Design, and more.
Not only to share our research but to generate out-of-the-box ideas for this new experience.
Post-workshop
After synthesizing the ideas that the group came up with, we began to mock up low-fidelity screens to test quickly, gather feedback, and iterate upon these designs.
Two key areas needed attention for this experience to be fruitful and cater to the pain points of our Athletes.
A new and improved way to enter releases that didn’t require users to have to manually wait on a screen, that didn’t allow them to do anything or leave, to get through to a product page.
An updated Release Calendar for which Athletes could enter releases from.
Detailed Designs
After usability testing the low-fidelity concepts and updating the designs based on the feedback received, we began to create high-fidelity designs
We tested these as well and made improvements where/when necessary
PROTOTYPE
OUTCOMES
This new experience will only live within the DSG app. Not on the web. And since this is ALL completely new functionality for DSG:
While the experience/flow isn’t new or ground-breaking when compared to other companies out there, there are still some open questions that need answering (from a backend standpoint) that are currently being discussed and worked through.
While all teams have aligned on the proposed design/flows, there may be changes necessary as engineers begin to build the new backend systems needed to drive this experience
For example, the DSG app does not have the means to collect entries and communicate to its users via push notifications because push notifications are currently powered by Adobe.
One workaround for this may be to use SMS text messaging as an MVP (because we know from our research that email is the least preferred method of communication)
There are also HUGE open questions on how bot mitigation will function and how we’ll be transparent to our users about this.
There are many other open-ended questions but we are confident that we will deliver the best in-class Product Launch experience for sneakerheads and non-sneakerheads alike.