Banana Republic | North Star Vision
My Role
UX/UI Direction
Product Lead
Product Strategy
Type of Work
UX/UI Design
Product Strategy
Prototyping
Branding
Design Research
Background
The Banana Republic (BR) digital experience hadn’t been significantly updated in over 6 years, but the brand had gone through some major changes. The core BR brand (BR Specialty) moved more up-market in style and price, Specialty introduced new target personas, and BR added home goods to the lineup. Additionally, in the last few years BR Factory had emerged as a significant portion of the overall business, which brought up questions of how much Specialty and Factory should differentiate as brands.
In support of the new strategic target, I kicked off a project to lay out "the art of the possible" for BR digital experiences. This then served as a foundation for the technical and experience roadmaps for long range planning (3+ years).
Key project phases
-
Quantitative and qualitative research to understand the new target customers, and their perceptions of BR
-
Develop customer needs and customer journeys to inform opportunity areas
-
Design and prototype key opportunity areas
-
Test opportunity areas with customers
-
Develop prioritization framework and roadmap
Discovery
The North Star project focused on understanding the BR competitive space, doing a deep dive on the new BR target customer needs, and using those insights to explore broad capabilities for features and/or content. I organized two up-front studies – one to gather brand/product insights, and a second to delve into the differences between Specialty and Factory customers (the last time anyone had conducted any large customer study on Factory customers was 2016).
I created both a brand brief and a product brief to synthesize our research, and to steer the project through the remaining phases.
Discovery concluded by synthesizing the business goals into areas for exploration, and developing our final project plan.
Design
We worked with UX research, product teams, the Banana Republic brand team, and executive stakeholders to finalize five focus areas where we felt the opportunities were unique to the brand and big enough that we wanted to broaden our exploration.
Taking the input from both the qualitative and quantitative research, and overlaying the brand/product briefs, we co-developed a final set of five opportunities areas. We then produced prototypes based on these five opportunities, and tested the concepts with our UX research team.
Deliver
After numerous reviews with key stakeholders, we narrowed our focus to several key opportunity areas, developed prototypes, and tested the concepts with BR Specialty and BR factory customers. We also conducted quantitative research on the broader feature list, and used the combined results to score features for prioritization. Honestly there's nothing more humbling than seeing your favorite feature get skewered by customers :)
Bringing the Vision to Life
Using customer feedback from concept tests and input from business and engineering, we scored each feature using the RICE framework (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort), assigned PMs to the highest ranking features, and scheduled kickoffs.
