MEC UX Roadmapping

Role: Manager, UX & Design

The Problem

The MEC design team was largely feature-driven, with its roadmap being informally driven by the product team. The impacts of this approach were:

  • Lack of team alignment under a data-driven plan

  • We had no place to communicate our research plans alongside designs

  • Teams across the business worked in silos, with very little collaboration

  • No visibility for the rest of the business into our work

The Challenge

Define a roadmapping process and use it to create a UX, Design, and Research Roadmap for the year.

Approach

Define Roadmapping Process

The UX and Design team had never built a roadmap together as a team, so we first needed to define the approach we’d take to get it done as well as our roles and responsibilities along the way.

We decided on a process that would give us time to gather information and open up more collaboration between teams.

 

Source: Nielsen Norman

 
 

1. Establish Goals

  • Align the team around a shared vision

  • Define a roadmap focused on problems and needs, and rooted in customer and business data

  • Increase collaboration between teams

  • Increase stakeholder visibility into our ongoing and upcoming work

 

2. Gather Inputs

We leaned on many sources of data to help us make the best roadmap possible:

Stakeholder Workshops

There are several teams across the business that interact with our customers on a daily basis, and they have a lot of wisdom to share:

  • Store staff and store operations

  • Marketing

  • Customer service

  • Web Merchandising

  • IT

We planned a series of workshops focused on the customer needs and pain points they witness or hear in their roles.

 

Customer Feedback

We pulled and analyzed responses from our customer surveys which included a website feedback survey, satisfaction scores, post-purchase survey, in-store purchase survey, and store pick-up survey.

Common themes included:

  • Slow delivery and store pick-up timelines

  • Cancelled or backordered items

  • Technical difficulties with website / Account issues

 

UX Audit

We conducted a thorough UX audit of our site to bring our attention to any big problem areas.

The majority of our traffic came from mobile devices, but our mobile search and product listing pages were slow, causing a poor browsing experience.


 

3. Affinity Mapping & Theme Creation

We gathered all of the inputs from the stakeholder workshops and our research, and began the affinity mapping exercise where we grouped items together under common needs or problems.

Once items were grouped, we divided up the themes between the team and we each created theme cards which summarized the key information:

  • Product area / Category

  • Theme / Key need

  • Description & Objective

  • Confidence level

  • Ownership

 

4. Prioritize Themes

We prioritized roadmap items based on

  • Severity of the pain point / need

  • Number of users impacted

  • Design effort

We used this criteria to advocate with the product managers for the most pressing customer needs:

  1. Providing customers a way to purchase without an account (guest checkout)

  2. Communicate consistent and accurate delivery timelines

  3. Help customers understand what size is right for them

 

5. Visualize & Share

In the absence of a roadmapping tool, we opted for a simple MIRO board (white boarding tool) to house our roadmap. All of our team and most of the business was familiar with the tool from our stakeholder workshops, and could access it easily.

Work was categorized into 4 groups:

  1. Research - themes we’re exploring that may not have a solution or scope defined

  2. Design - Ideas that have been defined and will be designed in preparation for implementation

  3. Validation - Implementation and validation of proposed solutions

  4. Process - Team operations initiatives that will help us work better together

Priorities at MEC tended to shift frequently, so we organized themes into quarters to avoid committing to unnecessary deadlines and to leave room for changes.

 

6. Revisit & Update

Managing the evolving roadmap in a more static format was challenging. It was, however, the perfect level of complexity for where we were at. We had a small team, and a piece of software would have slowed us down and been overkill.

We added monthly roadmap check-ins to update the priority and statuses of items, and then managed the rest of our work in JIRA.

Results

The roadmapping process helped us reach our goals of aligning the UX & Design team, bringing more visibility to our work, and ultimately prioritizing problems that would make an impact on our customers and the business. We expanded the process to the Product roadmap the next year.

  • New relationships and communication channels were opened up between teams across the business. We established monthly catchups with store and customer service teams to create a space for feedback or ideas.

  • We got executive buy-in on our roadmap and secured additional budget to support our research

Learnings

  1. When you dig into real customer problems, you find a lot that cannot be solved by design alone (e.g. high % of cancelled orders). We were dependent not only on the product managers to fight for these issues, but on partners across the business to help solve them.
    Learning: Implementing this roadmap process for the product roadmap would help surface important problems sooner and gain buy-in.

  2. Sometimes calling a feature by its need or problem is like forcing a square peg into a round hole. When the business decided to partner with Klarna, a buy now pay later vendor, we tried to keep our original theme name “Use financing as payment” to preserve the focus on the “need” but it was too clunky and everyone referred to it as Klarna.
    Learning: We didn’t have to be rigid in our approach, as long as we knew our work was rooted in the right things.