Walmart

Overview

Walmart is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a massive global chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores, and grocery stores. Founded by Sam Walton in 1962, it has grown into the world's largest retailer by revenue and private employer.

The Challenge

Because of an extremely tight time crunch, Walmart was attempting to rebrand and implement an entirely new design system for its e-commerce platform without conducting any type of heuristic evaluation (putting the proverbial cart before the horse).

The Solution

PubicisSapient was asked to assist with a retroactive UX evaluation, providing quick wins to improve the experience. We then teamed up with Walmart’s product managers and designers to apply this new design direction across multiple channels.

Phase 1 - Site audit & site map

We started by conducting a site audit to identify specific pages that could be templatized. In addition to auditing the main website, we identified 16 micro-sites that would also need to be redesigned.

Phase 2 - UX analysis

From there we conducted a soft analysis of the current state of "search", "category pages", "item pages" and "checkout flows", and recommended a variety of enhancements to improve the experience.

Phase 3- Design implementation

During the implementation phase, the Walmart design team redesigned the main navigation without labels, and tucked the hamburger functionality into the Walmart logo. Without the hamburger, I was concerned that their customers would not know how to navigate to different departments. I solved this by designing a couple of solutions that revealed the hamburger and labels while still honoring the new design. The one below is close to where Walmart finally landed.

Phase 4- Email ecosystem redesign

The last task was to apply the new design to their email system. In the process, we discovered that their current email framework was archaic and somewhat broken. The emails were not responsive and relied far too heavily on images which, with some email clients, did not display instantly. We redesigned the existing templates into components that could be used as building blocks for a new responsive email system. This system was efficient, flexible and could easily serve any business unit.

Components