Case Study

My Role

Project Director and Design Ops - scoped, resourced, managed and was accountable for entire project delivery.

The Challenge

A leading Canadian retail brand had outgrown their e-commerce platform. After we helped with the site redesign a year earlier, Mountain Equipment Co-op invited us back to help them make sure an exceptional user experience didn’t get lost in the mix.

The Approach

We began with a functional audit of the work we had completed in 2013 against new functionality opportunities with the new platform. We then conducted interviews with current and prospective MEC members and conducted customer intercepts in store to better understand MEC users needs and motivations when shopping. From the research insights, we created customer journey maps to document the ‘thinking’ ‘feeling’ and ‘doing’ of the user.

We hosted a series of Rapid Design Labs with key MEC stakeholders to map out the most challenging design problem first. We then collaboratively and iteratively designed functional prototypes of the new site for web, mobile, and tablet. Finally, we conducted usability testing on these interactive prototypes with current and prospective customers to test our assumptions and make the necessary changes to ensure usability.

The Solution

In the end, we were able to simplify and enhance the experience as a whole — from campaign and product landing pages straight through to an easier, more friendly checkout process. MEC was blown away by the speed, thoughtful design decisions, and attention to detail the UX Guys brought to the project, all under a very tight timeline.

The Outcome

We worked with MEC’s platform vendor and their technical team to ensure they could properly leverage our work. With this open collaborative approach, the vendor was able to implement a live site that worked virtually identically to our designs.

Not only was the client ecstatic with the results, the site won several awards for MEC over the year following the launch. To this day, significant parts of the site still follow our design direction to a tee.

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