
Fighting the bots and making friends with ‘sneakerheads’.
A story about designing my first product— the fastest, most transparent sneaker buying app.
One of the most exciting aspects of the sneakers industry is the release of limited edition trainers. Hundreds of people queue for days, 70,000 people online — all trying at once for the chance to buy the latest coveted release. And they are vocal in their negative feedback!

The challenge.
During product ‘launches’, the websites are put under extreme pressure as real fans combat hackers and bots to get the latest coveted release. This resulted in holding pages being used to manage traffic, essentially closing the doors to regular users.
Managing the problem meant that all aspects of the team were overworked and resource in fixing the problem wasn’t forthcoming, therefore we needed to work off-piste, to gain business support to actualise a solution.

A solution?
We knew the problem and proposed a new environment, in which the ‘sneakerhead’ could get the latest product, therefore allowing regular user to access main site and transact with site performance issues.
Through interviews with stakeholders, speed of purchasing was identified as a vital feature of the platform. By giving users the ability to pre-fill their buying requirements using clear, informative language to explain the process we looked to offset the pain and reluctance to handing over details. This also informed the calendar feature — by giving users foresight of upcoming releases, we aimed to enable a highly engaged user to keep returning and offer them some form of resolution to the pursuit of the next ‘big’ release.
We plotted a strategy on how to make the users’ experience, intuitive, seamless and rapid. I designed a new architecture, user stories and used wire-frames to help explain the proposal during consultations with key stakeholders, resulting in business support.

I love learning something new, and used the wireframes to create a working prototype. This gave us the chance to test an entirely new product and gain some validation from users as well as being able to communicate to stakeholders the proposed user journey and feature set.

Process informing the design
The users are seeing something before it’s ready — The Preview.

The design was constantly developing, iterating and feedback from the prototyping often shifted the design and architecture. This approach highlighted a need for separate brand, with the iterative approach impacting the aesthetic of the brand.
The speed and simplicity of the platform, informed the low-fi nature of the brand and photography, followed through on to social channels and films created in support of the new product.





Outcome
The business bought into the solution, progressing it into a budgeted project. I became the lynchpin of the project, working with specialists from a multitude of areas across the business, designing with them to ensure the product’s feature set was achievable and suitable for purpose. I really developed my ability to share ideas with a business focused approach, as well as utilising my readiness to collaborate to gather support and drive the project following my vision.
Involvement from the wider business did slow the project down. With BAU work to complete, I was unable to focus on the project and this negatively affected to overall speed in which the product was designed and built. To gain buy-in a brand and high-fidelity designs were created to create a vision-piece, this in turn had a debilitating affect This experience was valuable as I started to take more of lead in projects such as these of the JD Group.
This project is part of my professional portfolio and available to download here.

