The Home Depot.

My

Role

UX DESIGN

Led the end to end UX process

Co-facilitated an all day offsite workshop that led 70 of our H.R. business partners in user persona creation and affinity mapping

UX RESEARCH

Prototyped experiences at low and high fidelity through concept sketches, wireframes, and interactive prototypes

Redesigned the tool utilizing THD's existing design system

Conducted observations, interviews, and user testing

Completed the affinity mapping process and designed the information architecture

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted confidential information in this case study.

Results

Aided

Reduced

in enhancing a system used to catch criminals stealing from The Home Depot stores with a projected initial decrease in retail theft of $400,000.

the time store associates spent navigating between apps and calling store managers which is projected to result in saving them 10 minutes/use in an application used mutliple times a day.

business partners to empathize with the journey of potential applicants resulting in their desire to improve the on-boarding process for thousands of applicants.

Enabled

15 years ago Tandem Web Tools was created as a series of search tools used to pull information about sales.

Problem

This suite of tools has been built up over the years to include search tools for gift cards, receipts, deposits, refunds, and more. The user interface of Tandem Web Tools did not match the company's current design system, it had a very complex information architecture, and the necessary functions that users needed to do their jobs were missing.

Pain Points

Asset Protection

Store Associates

Corporate Security

Call Center Representatives

Financial Analyst

Not able to access robust information in Magellan
Codes and reports lack clarity

Unable to access Magellan or Tandem Web Tools
Unfamiliar with how to use the system

No quick way for others to see information entered by this team
Gift Cards take too long to deactivate

Missing access to certain tools needed to perform job easier

Doesn't understand the logic behind reports and codes

Understanding Users

Asset Protection

Originally we couldn't find anyone who had even heard of the tool. After asking many people and being very persistent, we finally found our users. Our user group was made up of five different groups of THD employees all with very different needs. None of the groups used this tool in the same way.

Financial Analyst

Store Associates

Call Center Representatives

Corporate Security

How Might We

How might we make the logic behind reports and the codes more clear?

003

How might we provide our users with one tool that they all can access and use efficiently?

001

How might we reduce the number of screens users have to navigate through to find information?

002

I created an information architecture diagram to help the team understand the navigation of the new application. As a team, we discussed any changes that should be made to the information architecture.

Next, I began to generate sketches based on the "how might we" questions we generated and the user pain points. I explored a few layouts that could help users get to the features that they used in the tool from the main page.

Sketches

We received feedback on these sketches from our users and my team. Ultimately, we decided to move forward with the design that utilized many key components from the Home Depot's current design system.

Improved

Efficiency

Tools were combined from Magellan and Tandem Web Tools to ensure that our users had access to all of the functionality needed to efficiently do their jobs.

Users were also given the ability to see different views within the same page in order to reduce the need to navigate to different pages.

Clarity of Reports & Codes

An information icon with a pop up modal was added to help our users make sense of reports and codes that appeared on the page. The modal provided definitions for codes and more information about reports on the page.

USER TESTING

We put our prototype in front of our users to get their feedback on the first iteration of the design. The users thought aloud while walking through the prototype, and we took notes in order to help us identify user actions, comments, confusion, and common themes.

Feedback

Lessons Learned

Leverage Low - Fidelity Prototypes

Utilizing Low - Fidelity prototypes can save a company money and time in the long run. If your High-Fidelity prototype is way off course, you have to spend months going back to the drawing board.

Fail Fast

This experience taught me the "skateboard vs. car" ideology.It is always better to design quickly and fail fast.

Continually Involve the User

At every stage, it's important to reach out to users to get feedback on the usability of the current design. This also helps ensure that you are truly meeting the user's needs.

May 2019 - August 2019

Tool

Team

Sketch

Daniel & Naasom

Nearly $50 billion was lost in 2018 to retail theft in the US. As an intern, I designed a tool to help The Home Depot unmask these criminals.

We wanted to ensure our application was available to all of our users by making it a web based application that could be accessed through a URL. The designs were optimized to align with the design standards for THD's web content.

Easy Access

Users loved the new search features available. However, some users needed the ability to also search by drivers license in order to complete one of many key tasks within their role.

001

Some users did not notice the help icon that was now available to them to explain the unlabeled codes within the application.

002

003

Tabs were created to offer users choice in the way that they could search, but many users did not notice the tabs.

I have no idea what this tool is, but I would use it if I knew it was there. It could be so helpful.

Store Associate

Methods

We chose to observe users while working as they utilized Tandem Web Tools in order to better understand how the tool is used. Users could not find the tool in their system and had never seen it before.

Observations

We also interviewed users in order to learn more information about their history of use with the tool, as well as their challenges, wishes, and favorite parts of the tool. From our interviews, we learned about a newer tool called Magellan. This tool was intended to replace Tandem Web Tool four years prior to 2018. However, Magellan was a thick client tool, was not accessible to all users, and did not follow The Home Depot's current design system.

Interviews

Affinity Maps

Next, we chose to complete Affinity Maps in order to organize the information we learned from each user group. We decided to create separate affinity maps for each user group, because many of the user groups were using different functions within the tool. We wanted to easily separate each group's unique pain points.

We knew that we could not address all of the pain points during iteration one.

We utilized a Prioritization Matrix in order to decide which features and user pains should be addressed in the first iteration of the design. We used difficulty and value as the metrics for our matrix.

One of the values of the Home Depot is "Creating Shareholder Value". We wanted to ensure that any new changes were aligned with that value. Also, our team wanted to be sure that we could focus on features that we would finish within the scope of our 3 month internship. Any features that were out of scope were added to the future recommendations we gave to our team at the end of the internship.

Design.

Research.

Finally, Wireframes and High - Fidelity Prototypes were created to test the following new features with our users.