Westfield
Westfield.com.au, Ticketless Parking, WIFI, Westfield Editorial
The majority of my time spent at Westfield I worked on enhancing their main website, designing features and enhancements for a strong backlog with the help of some of the finest digital natives I’ve worked with.
This was my first experience working in a truly Agile environment, possibly the easiest place I’ve ever practiced User Testing (being able to walk downstairs straight into the centre and have direct access to customers was a boon for the product), and one of the most complicated IA models for a website I’ve worked on.
Westfield.com.au
The brief:
Westfield had made a big push to create an online store / product catalogue, however just before I started they had dropped the store part but wanted to keep the catalogue for SEO reasons, they also wanted to appear as a reputable place to go for fashion (their key target market was young fashion conscious women), all this was to be mobile first.
Requirements:
- SEO & UX were paramount and has to be in total alignment
- Responsive web design with separate ios/android app.
- Editorial section to engage key target markets
The Solutions:
Editorial
I designed and tested an editorial section that was to integrate featured products, stores and competitions all of which were deep linked back into the main site for SEO benefits. We engaged an editor to create rich content who wanted to create flat lays of the products (hard to do at the time) and other complexities like editorial was nationwide but local centres only had certain stock so to ensure a smooth experience I created fallback designs for when products were unavailable. In the end though the product is still going strong years after I left and the analytics combined with my user testing showed a strong and passionate set of engaged customers.
Stores/Map
While SEO was very important to get customers onto the website, from user testing we knew their was a big segment of users that were already in the centre when loading the website who just wanted to find store information and to orientate themselves. The flow from products to stores to the map was possibly one of my biggest itches at Westfield, while not a key requirement of mine I decided to UX the shit out of it.
I first engaged customers in contextual enquires trying to understand how they currently used the map and store info to get around the centres, additionally analytics from the in centre directories gave me a good set of data to work from.
I created a prototype to initially show business stakeholders but also to validate concepts with customers. I created all wireframes and designs in Sketch but used Invision to bring them to life: https://invis.io/2X952FG7N#/65081664_Store_Details_ClickMap
I had left the company before this was implemented but 6 months after I left I noticed they had put it into production, I’m not sure how well it went but it certainly felt like the right direction to me!
Ticketless Parking
When doing research in the centres a common complaint with most customers was regarding the parking. They mainly hated queues and paying too much because they forgot when they came in, this wasn’t their fault alone as the queues were long and congestion made it hard for them to know the exact time and many customers stated they liked to keep the ticket in the car so they didn’t lose it.
Our solution introduced licence plate scanning, eliminated the need to use pay stations by creating an app that also reminded them how long they had been in the centre for, even better it enabled us to grant customers with a disability free parking without having to go through the time consuming process of getting the ticket validated at the customer service desk.
Ticketless parking was first a proof of concept at the Miranda centre but has now proved so successful that it’s rolling out to almost all centres that have the technology to do so.
