UX & design thinking in complex projects (non-UI)

Working at Walmart Chile, I had the opportunity to be part of a super multidisciplinary team with devs, data scientists, impact leads, data analysts, and people who cared about improving the experience based on data.

https://storyset.com/work Work illustrations by Storyset

Back then, I was the only UX designer dedicated to exploring and helping do experiments based on advanced analytics.

The backlog of the team was tough. I had it full of different tasks, real different ones from each other. Also, the team was newy, so the organization was a challenge. We were learning over the road.

The very first complex situation was working in a team who didn’t know anything about my role, so I had to educate them about the skills, way of work, and what UX actually does.

I had two goals with this initiative:

• To show the product designer’s skills and how they help in exploration and experimentation.
• To let them know the importance of bringing on board more designers to the area since it was hard to attend 5 different teams with 5 different focuses.

It was a very strategic move because it gave me the possibility to propose a new way of work, where UX and Data analysts were working together to discover improvements or problems in any business unit at Walmart to explore de size of the opportunity and throw the ball to the data scientist team, to build an experiment based on a data model to test.

We did experiments at the e-commerce site, Lider app, but also some others at Supply, Merchandise, and Store operations.

Applying design thinking in a complex project (non-UI project)

One of the most challenging projects I worked at Data exploration was a Promotion recommender model.

My role here wasn’t designing a solution, since when I joint the project, the solution was already working, but we had a bigger problem.

If we looked at the numbers, the solution was looking good in terms of suppositions. If the company shoppers would be applied the recommender model to their job, they’d have better built promotional lists, in terms of product selection. Their feedback about the model was good too, they found it very useful, but the problem was they weren’t using it at all.

So, my work started here. I had to discover why the Buyers weren’t using the promo recommender.

I applied design thinking to address the problem.

1 Empathize

The most important stage.

I started researching the Merchandise area. I wanted to know the areas and products that composed it. I met other UX designers, product owners, stakeholders, and the buyers themselves. It was a new whole world to me since I worked in e-commerce only before this.

I wanted to learn:

• Roles, teams, and stakeholders
• Products and processes
• Way of work and workflows

2 Define

I discover that other areas were mapping the pricing and promotions process, but they weren’t mapping it in terms of users.

It was important to create a blueprint focused on personas.

When talking to Buyers about the use of the tool, I discover that:

• The information given was correct, it only had some improvements that we mapped.
• They all had different timings and ways of work.
• They weren’t using it not because it was bad or because they didn’t want to. But because we were giving them the recommendation at the wrong timing.
• They had too many documents to review, and we were adding an extra one.

3 Ideate

What we needed to do was:

• To create a new way of delivering the recommendations to address the two bigger problems: Wrong timing and the number of documents or sources to have the whole picture to make decisions.

4 Prototyping

We meet other characters in the play who worked together with merchant suppliers to add the recommender at the very beginning of the process. The goal was to unify the information to make decisions and to deliver the relevant information at the correct timing.

5 Test

I missed the testing of the new tool since I switched jobs 🫣, but I’m sure if the projected results of the model were very positive, bringing incremental sales, the new format of delivery was a really good improvement to the initiative.

UX is a need in every part of the business.

— — -

Si quieres de hablar de growth, growth design, experiments, ux en data models, coméntame o contáctame.