Client
GDI is a Canadian women’s fashion retailer with two distinct brands that share a loyalty program for customers of GARAGE and DYNAMITE.
Challenge
Develop a POC prototype of a catered digital shopping experience fueled by machine learning with in-store retail touchpoints integrated into the user journey.
My Contributions
UX/UI Design
User Journey and Service Blueprint
Design System in Figma
Context
This was a cross-disciplinary operation which required collaboration between product design, key stakeholders and product owners, data scientists, subject matter experts, an agile development team, and the marketing department and content strategists. The product launch would also include the warehouse and retail store teams.
For the initial POC, we had to define the end-to-end user experience and product vision by gathering and prioritizing requirements to inform user flows, journey maps and a detailed service blueprint capturing digital and physical touchpoints. We created a shopping companion to curate seasonal outfits inspired by previous purchases and user input from fun quizzes.
How might we provide useful suggestions for clothing items and outfits based on seasonality and your personal preferences?
Low-Fidelity Exploration
Our team of designers sketched out all user flows before ever launching our design software. This enabled us to iterate quickly and collaborate with teams early on to gather feedback.
Service Blueprint
As this product would live in both the digital world and physical store spaces, it was important to map out all these interactions. This tool helped get all the departments on board with the concept, prepare for how it would impact their current workflows, and encouraged our collaborators to provide input early in the design process.
The Style Quiz
A significant portion of the users experience was the Style Quiz which was used to determine their preferences for clothing and accessories. I worked closely with subject matter experts to understand the different terminology (who knew there were so many types of plaid!) and the data team to help map quiz terms to product attributes tagged in the database.
Essentially, by inputting your preferences we could determine what styles you preferred and that would help us provide stronger recommendations. This data was paired with users past purchase history which was input using a rather complicated weighting scale to balance user input with real purchase data.
UI Design
As the two GDI brands have quite different branding, it was challenging to find a balance between them. Fortunately, we could all agree that pink was the best choice for our primary CTA color. This decision made it easy to keep all other colours fairly neutral.
An Abrupt Ending
As you can imagine, the COVID-19 pandemic hit clothing retailers pretty hard. The project was placed on hold when the company filed for creditor protection in 2020.
Tamika Dorrington Portfolio 