Web • iOS • Android

Checkers Digital Ecosystem

Company: Checkers - South Africa's largest retailer

Role: Head of UX & Product Design

Year: 2018 - 2021

Playforms: Responsive Web, iOS, Android, Whatsapp, USSD

Checkers is one of South Africa's largest retailers owned by the Shoprite group of companies. Checkers largely serves the middle-to-upperclass segment with over 6 million registered rewards customers. With the large amount of legacy systems, people and processes to replace, Checkers largely still relies on their physical store footprint over full ecommerce.

MY ROLE

Joining the Shoprite group as the first UX Specialist came with the ambitious task of designing their digital channel experiences, design capabilities and evangelise design and design thinking.

Strategic Objectives

1. Discovery & Ideation

Briefs are never great, so we had to really get stuck in unpacking the various problems and the different possible solutions through analysis and ideation. To do this we ran a series of workshops gathering all existing information, business requirements and customer insights, analysed our current state, competitor research and assessed the SAP Commerce technology stack to know what we're working with.

Primary Research

• Field studies
• Current State Analysis
• Competitor Anlysis
• Insights Gathering
• Cluster learnings & Themes
• Opportunity Areas
• Create HMW

Identifying Business Goals

• Discovery Workshops
• Stakeholder Interviews
• Program Increment Planning
• Requirements & Constraints Gathering

Identifying User Goals

• Empathy Mapping
• Persona Building
• User Interviews
• Contexual Enquiry
• Journey & Empathy mapping
• Card sorting

2. Digital Product Ecosystem

The Shoprite digital ecosystem started off as 2 separate AEM web platforms and a poorly built native app that weren't sustainable solutions to begin with. Shoprite not only adopted SAFe, but we completely migrated over to SAP commerce and Marketing to drive the centrepiece of their ecosystem, built 2 react native applications and launched 2 brand new Whatsapp and USSD channels.

Unlike the solution, the objectives were simple:

1. Create a commerce-ready online platform solution for our rewards program
2. Centralise our identification and access management
3. Integrate analytics and tracking at the core of our online insights
4. Personalisation must be at the heart of everything we do
5. Expand our digital ecosystem to where our customers are and not the market

In 3 years we design and built a robust digital ecosystem for both Shoprite and Checkers. that laid a strategic foundation where all our features could be shared, altered and deployed across all our digital channels. We also centralising all our customers data (online, in-store and transactional) that enabled us to create truly personalised shopping experiences.

The tricky part was trying to understand which new and unique features we needed to release, and by when...

3. Design Operations

First, I had to lay the foundation for a team. Leaning heavily on external vendors isn't sustainable or efficient.

I had 2 months to lay the platform foundation, wireframe the entire vanilla ecosystem, lay a feature roadmap and grow the team to steadily deliver new features and enhancement after we had launched.

Our sprints were simple. Unpack, analyse and understand both business objectives and customers need. Experiment on as many possible solutions, test and iterate until we've found the perfect fit. Design the right solution, create detailed prototypes and help facilitate the hand over of key requirements between business and development.

4. User Experience Goals & Functionalities

5. Our Activity Model

6. Macro User Flow

7. Customer Journey Map

Design System & Interface Design