Bringing UX design to Carlsberg webshop
Carlsberg's biggest webshop platform seemed to be working nicely because from a business perspective if the revenue ok it's because everything is working as it should, right? NO, not really.
Intro and context
Our product team (Carlsberg webshop) from the last couple of years was very focused on maintaining and providing markets with the asked features or improvements, and when I was asked to assume the design work in the Webshop, I immediately understood that this was not only a matter of connecting with our users and bringing their voice to the discussions, but it was a lot around bringing a UX awareness to the team itself.
Oh my dear tickets
Like in every product that is lacking UX work, when a designer is onboarded into it, this is what he/she gets, a sh*t ton of design tickets.
While this is very useful, because it gives you a decent backlog of work, this is just the surface, and you as a designer should always be triggered by what's going under that surface.
Hands down to work
After a couple of introduction calls and a pile of pending design tickets, now the ball it's on me.
When your product team is tech oriented, it is your responsibility to show them the importance of the design, and the value it can bring in different stages of product development cycle.
Getting to know the people
Most of the people working the the webshop i didn't knew, so I've asked to have a 30 mins call with different profiles, from front-end developers, QA's to Product managers and Product owners. My goal was to understand, basically 2 things: what were their struggles and major concerns, and how do they foresee the design role helping them.
This for me is a mandatory activity when you're new to a product, it gives you background, it gives you context... and more questions to be answered. :)
Bringing people together
We had a global WOW workshop to try to scale and better estimate product teams work, and for me was an amazing opportunity to make sure design as a discipline is being consider and taken seriously in product development stages
As a workshop outcome, we have now a good understanding of where design goes in different stages of the product development, and ux activities to support. This was not only for the webshop, but for all digital product, it was great to see everyone understanding the value of the design, and what design really is, design is not a fancy button and a flashy colours. Design creates impact, mitigates loses and brings innovation to companies.
Cool another framework, now what?
Now, I want to make sure that this is being applied, in order to scale design work, not only for Carlsberg internally, but to the markets we support.
Props to my PM, very conscious about design work, always finding time to connect and support most of my activities. A good example is a bi-weekly call we have with markets, where he asked me to look at the most "rated" tickets from the markets, and build a ux plan for those, and then share it in one of our sessions.
Those tickets were clustered together under themes, so we could spot patterns prioritise work, not based on features, but rather on themes.
Because we had a lot of issues scattered across themes, we (my PM and myself) agree in highlighting the themes more relevant for the markets, just to keep my focus...and my sanity.
Can we see some action now?
I started with something that was being push by different markets very frequently, that was to improve the experience of our customers in the PCP - Product category page. I will highlight on a very high level my work in the different stages of the design process, because I want to share my learnings when sharing and getting feedback from the markets, and not so much the design issues in a very granular way.