Staples Printing & Marketing

Staples Inc. is a Fortune 500 company involved in the sale of office supplies and related products. My focus was on improving the Staples printing & marketing materials website and leading the design of a greenfield Staples business document printing website.

Intro

During my time at Staples Inc. in Vancouver, Canada, I worked as a full-time user experience designer, where I was responsible for improving the user experience of various Staples websites. My day-to-day work involved conducting user research and producing UX deliverables while collaborating closely with a product manager and seven other on-site UX designers.

My key responsibilities included:

  • Collaborating on user experience planning and conducting usability research to identify user needs and pain points.
  • Working with stakeholders and users to generate business and user requirements, ensuring that design solutions met both user needs and business goals.
  • Developing flows, wireframes, mock-ups, and prototypes based on requirements and specifications.
  • Iterating designs based on user feedback and testing.
  • Ensuring a consistent branded look and feel across all collaterals, creating and enforcing design guidelines to maintain a cohesive user experience.

Shopping cart UX

I was tasked to do a UX review of the shopping cart user flow, the most important part of an e-commerce site because of its significance when converting visitors to customers.

I spent weeks researching the flow, getting relevant documentation from different teams, re-organizing the documents, analyzing the data that exists, and collecting the quantitative data from Fullstory analytics software and qualitative data from usability tests.

Shopping cart improvements

After analyzing the current state of designs and observing the real life usage (through Full Story) I noticed several issues and proposed design changes that would resolve them.

To collect arguments for my findings I conducted usability testing with 20 participants through the UserTesting.com platform.

Participants confirmed the design change ideas and that helped me to create a UX review deliverable which I presented to the Staples Head of Design. Afterwards it was sent for implementation to the product & development teams.

Coupon code improvements

One of the areas that required changes was the coupon code management. I ran additional remote user testing sessions for this specific part (1 pilot session + 5 real sessions).

During the user testing sessions, participants were tasked to create a brochure and to buy it by using a coupon code.

After finishing the tests, I reviewed the test results and proposed the design changes which reduced the number of steps needed to add a coupon.

I added the ability to dismiss the coupon code by clicking on the area outside of it, along with displaying the user an encouraging message in cases when the coupon doesn’t work which resulted in reduced customer frustration.

Improving the conversion

After the research, I came up with the step by step plan for improving the conversion rate in the shopping cart flow.

The solution was to reduce the number of steps that it takes for the end user to reach the end of the shopping cart experience.

I managed to reduce the number of steps from 6 to 4, drastically reducing the time spent in the shopping cart therefore directly affecting the behavior of the visitors and the checkout conversion rate.

Information architecture through card sorting

As the lead designer on the new business printing platform, I needed to research the information architecture that we should use. The optimal technique for that task was to do a card sorting test, which exposes user’s expectations of the information structure through understanding their mental model. I conducted the test with 17 cards and a total of 25 participants (2 pilot + 23 regular).

My goal was to find a better naming for categories of the global navigation menu. So I chose an open card sorting research technique. Participants organized 17 phrases into categories that they would expect to find on a document printing website. They then labeled each category.

I conducted the test by using OptimalSort software and UserTesting.com platform to find participants.

I wrote an article that was well accepted by the Medium community and that explained how I did the card sort.

Boosting team productivity

Creating design systems became increasingly useful in 2018 and Sketch, the popular app for UX design has at that time just introduced the ability to add libraries. At the same time, wireframes created by our team were done by using 3rd party templates and time was lost with each person researching and configuring their own templates. This led to the wireframe styling not being consistent, leading to confusion between team members.

I presented the idea to team members to create a design system for wireframes based on atomic design. After getting approval, I designed and onboarded the team members. It was then adopted by 8 members of the UX team.

Lessons learned

My time at Staples allowed me to hone my skills in UX design, research, and collaboration, delivering effective design solutions that met both user and business needs. After previously mainly working on early-stage startup products, working for Staples was a great way for me to grow UX skills that are necessary on products that serve millions of users. After the experience of working with Staples, I developed the confidence to tackle any user experience design problem – from quickly producing results for small companies to solving difficult design problems for corporations.