An Innovative Baby Registry
I led a cross-functional team through a Design Sprint to arrive at a prioritized set of concepts that were prototyped and tested with Millennial customers. Our tested concept, went into production and launched in April 2019. It served as a North Star for Walmart Global Tech’s push to innovate in retail. Besides facilitating the workshop and documenting the process for other teams to follow, I designed and built the prototype for early user-testing, and produced hundreds of development ready screens alongside my team - across iOS, Android and responsive web.
The Challenge
From previous research, we knew that a cumbersome onboarding experience and the inexperience of new parents, were two of the problems that were leading to low registry completion and lackluster registry size. We knew that automating the experience for new parents through smart recommendations could get us to our goal of doubling the size of the registry.
Design Sprinting for babies
The success of this project helped to popularize the Design Sprint approach at Walmart. The timed activities in the Design Sprint helped our team move quickly to decisions about the direction we wanted to take with our new baby registry. That’s me on the right!
During Ask the Experts, we generated HMW statements that we clustered into HL themes.
We voted on the themes, to prioritize the most important problems to solve.
Ask the experts included a look at primary research and the needs of new parents.
During lightning demos, I captured the main takeaways for the team on a whiteboard. The resulting sketches were helpful in jogging the team’s memory during ideation.
One of my favorite exercises, is crazy 8s, 1 minute doodles of stand out ideas and remixes.
The Design Sprint culminated in a 16-grid collaborative storyboard, a visual scenario that demonstrated our end-to-end vision and informed the concept prototype.
A view into our Design Sprint room shows the frames from a collaborative storyboarding session. The scenario we captured helped inform the InVision prototype and mock chatbot which I created using Bot Society.
The concept prototype was remote tested across 5 states, with 15 Millennial registrants, and 15 gift givers of diverse backgrounds.
We knew through data that only 25% of registrants were completing the existing on-boarding process which utilized traditional editable fields for due date, gender and other data. Inspired by a library assistant named Libby, I championed for a conversational UI (chatbot) concept so moms could text in their responses, mirroring the behavior or texting in-laws and experienced friends and family for advice on what to buy for the new baby. The “baby bot” concept was a hit in our customer interviews, and eventually made it into our MVP.
Participants liked the option to see personalized product recommendations based on their preferences - so long as they could easily control, replace and delete the items. Our central concept was a conversational UI, we later named Hoo the Owl, that collected preferences to help immediately make personalized product recommendations.
Another key feature that was a hit with our research participants, was the option to pre-populate the registry with expert recommendations and only swap out a few items with ones you choose. This features resonated with time-sensitive moms who wanted the maximum help with building a registry. With the right controls in place such as being able to easily swap or delete unwanted items, this concept could work. The customer outcome is less work to hunt and peck for items.
I partnered with the engineering team to create dynamic ADA-compliant color themes based on mom’s nursery style preferences, making each registry feel immediately personal.
Our merchandising and business team created highly curated product assortments that were based on the registrant’s answers to a few key questions ranging from the gender of the baby, to nursery style preferences from minimalist to trendy. New partnerships with premium baby brands came as a result of the higher bar for design.
We iteratively improved the registry experience to give parents more control over registry items, improve the curation experience and provide a path to easy logging of in-store purchases. As a result we saw improvement in key metrics around onboarding completions, registry size and conversions.
Improved Gifting
Allowed Gift Givers to easily find products that are available to purchase and apply eCommerce best practices.
Provided easy path for store shoppers to attribute their in-store purchases to the registry by scanning their phone.
An improved experience for registrants:
Hoo the registry assistant will help shoppers sign up quickly and easily. Shoppers can start their registry from scratch, or Hoo will provide item suggestions from key baby categories to get them started.
There will no longer be a pre-populated list of items automatically added to the registry
The registry will continue to provide suggestions as the registrant list grows
Dynamic categories group similar items together as they are added to registry
Improved Curation and Management
Continued to provide easy access for making registry public and sharing it with others.
Provided additional guidance and control by offering relevant recommendations within
the registry experienceProvided a clear view into the purchasing status at both the registry and category levels
