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Portfolio

VF Corporation 1.5 Platform Migration

Opportunity

At VF Corporation, there are several brands that are living on the WCS platform for their North American and European regions. Currently, this platform doesn’t allow much room for expanding on page templates or personalization which limits the brands ability to storytell around their products. Additionally, site performance is below par, causing some pages to take up to 40 seconds to load resulting in a substantial hindrance to the consumer experience.

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Outcome

VFC's digital technology team plans to migrate their leading brands’ e-commerce websites over to a new platform, Salesforce Commerce Cloud. By doing this, it would allow the design and engineer teams to clean up the tech stack and enhance the front end user experience. (KPIs: revenue and engagement)

Role 
UX Researcher

Tools 
Figma/Figjam, InVision Freehand, Mural, UserTesting, Baymard, ContentSquare, Insider Intelligence, Gartner

Skills
Consumer Journey
Gap Analysis
Competitive Audit
Task Analysis
User Testing
Usability Testing
 

About VF Corporation

"VF Corporation is one of the world's largest apparel, footwear and accessories companies connecting people to the lifestyles, activities and experiences they cherish most through a family of iconic outdoor, active and workwear brands."

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The goal of this project was to create a more inclusive and updated experience for VF's users as they transitioned into a new platform, starting with the company's leading brands: Vans, Timberland and The North Face.

 Brands in VFC's portfolio
The Plan

As a UX Researcher, I was assigned to a team of three to work on a project with the goal of developing a new research approach. Our aim was to alleviate migration pain points for all teams and enable brands to adopt a more consumer-friendly experience as we transitioned to the new platform.This new approach divided the design process up by:

 

  • Focusing first on brand agnostic research and low-fidelity designs.

  • Discovering best practices for simple ecommerce flows

  • Supporting industry best practices with market research and testing.

 

Once the research was established, it would be handed off to the design team to apply the brand themes based off of what was built in the previous step.

 

From there, the IX/Visual design team would apply the brand themes based off of what was built in the previous step.

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Overview of timeline and descriptions of process
The Process

To effectively manage the workload, our research team divided the websites into various segments. Each team focused on specific areas of the consumer journey to ensure we could concentrate on gap analysis per brand and region. The primary objective was to identify any consumer friction points and to study best practices within the market.

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Each segment was allocated approximately two weeks to gather and sort through research before beginning the design exploration phase. Initially, we collected content from production for each of the sites and documented the current state in detail, including analytics. We analyzed the NORA and EMEA versions of each site to identify any visual and functional differences, including desktop and mobile. This helped to standardize site designs for VF brands as a whole.

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The image shown below is an example of the "Global Elements" board (elements of the site consisting of the header, primary and utility nav, footer, etc)

Example of research board divided by segment
A closer look of annotations per brand
A Different Approach

We came to the realization that we required a more precise method for organizing the data layout due to the vast amount of information we were collecting. To prioritize the data on the research board, we had to modify our approach. Our objective was to make the plan easier to comprehend, enabling all the researchers and designers to quickly understand the information.

 

To evaluate our findings, we introduced a grading system that our research team would go over with the IX/visual team. We would assess the level of consumer needs and compare it to the level of development effort, which resulted in small, medium, and large efforts. Small efforts were included immediately, while large efforts were postponed for post-launch initiatives. Medium efforts were reviewed on a case-by-case basis with the broader design team.

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This process of prioritization enabled the research team to identify key recommendations for UX improvements to be incorporated into the brand agnostic designs. These recommendations were summarized in executive summaries.

Example of executive summaries of recommendations
Example of executive summaries of recommendations
Example of executive summaries of recommendations
Example of executive summaries of recommendations
Breaking Down the Research

We made further improvements to our approach in synthesizing our research boards. Even though we primarily focused on gap analysis and market research, the existing way we presented information was not conducive to pinpointing specific details. To address this, we needed to identify the pain points experienced by our designers and engineers when they reviewed the research boards and develop a more efficient method of presenting the information.

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As part of our efforts to streamline the board, we introduced a matrix for each segment, which included high-level information such as snapshots of design solutions, descriptions of functionalities to support the design solutions, identification of brands using the solutions, and any vendors involved. We also developed more detailed boards to walk through the journeys, outlining any use cases for a particular topic and including analytics to support the current performance.

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Image shown below is a segment of a larger research board (in order from left to right: matrix, gap analysis, and analytics) along with images of the full research boards.

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Once the low fidelity designs were collectively approved by the whole design team, each frame was annotated by their new functions and designs by the IX team. Our research team took a step further and did a gap analysis between the current state of the sites and the new designs, each color coded by bucket.

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The gap analysis was separated into 4 buckets: 

  • Gap - Net New: New to all Brands (coming out of 1.0)

  • Partial Gap - Semi Net New: 1-2 brands may already have this in 1.0 but not all brands 

  • Fit+ - Currently exists in 1.0 but there is a modified version for 1.5

  • Fit - Functionality remains the same as 1.0 (there is no indicator for this on the designs)

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This helped business analysts of each brand and our engineers easily identify exactly what is changing and how its changing onto the 1.5 platform. 

Click to enlarge slideshow
Old vs. New
Example of standardized designs with annotations
Closer view of annotations
Current Status

This migration is currently in-progress and is planning on a short term (MVP) launch Q2 of 2023 for the European sites of The North Face, Vans and Timberland, including Timberland’s North American sites. At this point, the team has two more segments to work through before research wraps up the brand agnostic initiative. 

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