Redesigning the Saks OFF 5TH App

Problem Statement

The Saks OFF 5TH app is currently being developed and maintained by a third-party vendor, but the business has decided to terminate the contract this year and bring the app's development in-house.

The app currently relies heavily on web integrations and other project roadmaps, as it primarily consists of webviews. This dependency makes it difficult to optimize the customer experience and streamline engineering processes.

To address these challenges, the company plans to undertake a complete overhaul of the app's architecture. This will involve enhancing its efficiency and user-friendliness while reducing its reliance on external systems, ensuring that customers have an optimal experience when using the app.

The Challenge

Our team challenge was to develop a brand-new native mobile application, compatible with both iOS and Android platforms, that prioritizes performance, reliability, and analytics.

This initiative aims to provide a seamless end-to-end shopping experience for customers, resulting in increased revenue from both the app and its users. The goal is to create a mobile app that is efficient, user-friendly, and robust, enhancing the customer's overall experience and facilitating the growth of the business.

My Role

Product Design Lead

June 2022 — Present

As the product design lead, I had the opportunity to redesign the entire mobile app, presenting a unique chance to greatly enhance the customer experience and bring in incremental value to the business.

The redesign process required careful analysis of customer feedback, competitor research, and industry trends to inform the development of an intuitive, user-friendly, and visually appealing interface. With a thorough understanding of the app's technical dependencies and limitations, I was able to leverage my design expertise to create a seamless and enjoyable experience for customers.

My responsibilities included:

Partner with product, engineering and business leads to develop and execute the product roadmap.
Go deep on customer insights, analytics and competitive analysis to drive design decisions.
Facilitate working sessions with key stakeholders to define business and product requirements, and lead design review sessions to gain alignment.
Create user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and pixel perfect mockups.
Collect customer feedback through surveys, focus groups, moderated and unmoderated user testing; and share results with stakeholders.
Work closely with product managers to review user stories and ensure all design requirements and acceptance criteria are accurately captured.
Work closely with developers to execute designs and conduct visual QA.

Redesigning the Saks OFF 5TH App

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