From Screens to Experiences

Transforming Design Thinking at Kohl’s

Thanks to the co-authors of this article Julie Baum, Mahil Maurice, Garret DePass , Kelsey Kamm and a shout out to the entire Design community at Kohl’s.

Design drives Usability

Usability drives Adoption

Adoption drives Customer Performance Indicators
(CPIs — Time, Convenience, Options, Savings, Recognition)

CPIs drive Business Performance Indicators
(BPIs — Revenue, Growth, Profitability, Liquidity)

Kohl’s, a traditional retailer, is going through an exciting transformation with Design Thinking and Lean Product Experimentation at the cornerstones of the movement. By placing our customers first, we are shifting our focus from designing what’s on the screen to bringing value to the customer at every step of their journey.

Design is a powerful tool that gives teams the framework required to make informed and strategic product decisions that are centered around the customer. Design helps us respond and adapt quickly, by focusing on the customer experience throughout the software implementation process, and by connecting business drivers with customer behavior and insights.

At Kohl’s, we’ve found the best way to do this is by embedding Design into the product development process and having a strong voice to influence the experience. Design thinking is a Balanced team sport, and is multidisciplinary in nature, stretching across Product Design, Product Management, and Engineering. It requires a team dynamic that fosters feedback across disciplines to identify not only what is desirable for the user, but what is feasible to build and what is valuable for the business.

Organization transformed by Design Thinking DNA

For Design to be successful in this framework, it has to shift from simply mocking screens, to running experiments, and then go further to defining entire experiences. All the while, designs must be measured against CPIs and BPIs to ensure user-centricity and product viability respectively. At Kohl’s Technology, we’ve restructured the entire organization to facilitate this change. Our goal is to become an organization with a product mindset fueled by Design Thinking DNA.

Starting with small, measurable outcomes

A cornerstone of Design Thinking is the ability to focus on the most valuable outcomes first, while driving minimum business increment. The idea is to “Build, Measure, Learn,” and repeat the cycle again and again. Out of 100 requirements, what if only 5 are actually critical to the success of your product? How might one tell the difference between those and the 50 or so that only add marginal value? We focus on building something small, measuring the results, and then adjusting course accordingly. We’ve found this allows us to focus more on major improvements and innovations, while cutting effort on requirements that only offer small, marginal value.

Reduce the risk of building the wrong thing

The biggest risk to any product comes from defining and building too much before it gets evaluated with real end users. Any untested feature is an assumption, and assumptions are all risks. The riskiest assumptions need to be validated with frequent feedback loops from the users in order to define what’s safe enough to invest valuable engineering efforts in. At Kohl’s, we build incrementally via short iterations so we can test frequently and reduce the risk of building the wrong thing. We use lean practices, keeping a narrow focus to increase speed, reduce risk and never lose sight of usability. Counting our successes and learning from failures allows us to adapt quickly to better meet customer needs.

Short iterations and feedback loops allow us to detect defects, make continuous improvements throughout the implementation, and grow the product through continuous validation, thus minimizing risk. Our goal is to have usable code that solves a real problem for a real person, live in production, at any given time via continuous delivery.

As we move through the product design cycle, we continuously generate ideas that we believe can deliver real value to our users. These ideas all contain assumptions (risks), therefore validating the assumptions via lean experiments, failing, and repeating this cycle is extremely important. Working this way keeps us from building the wrong product, which would have minimal usability and adoption.

This method leans into the biggest benefit of Design Thinking — Innovation. It provides the teams space to try out new innovative ideas, validate them, then either double down on the idea, or fail fast and try out another direction.