Reinventing Macy's Homepage
Macy's
Overview
Macy's Reinvent is a conceptual design project aimed to reinvent Macys.com homepage by refocusing brand and content strategy to fit the needs of customers today.
Project Goal
Macy's homepage design was targeting for budget conscious customers because they were the majority of customers. However, our marketing research showed that other customer group, fashionable spenders spend more money than the budget conscious customers. Thus, the goal of project was to improve shopping experience for the fashionable spenders.
Fashionable Spenders' Voice
In order to understand how fashionable spenders feel about Macy's homepage, we conducted focus group user tests. They said
I don't like the ads. It feels like it's trying too hard to sell to me and that makes it feel tacky.
Outdated, feels like early to mid 2000's
Remove all of the unnecessary clutter on your site. It makes shopping on your site stressful instead of pleasant.
These comments clearly showed there's a large gap between their preferences and the current homepage design.
We also asked them to rank Macy's and its competitors. Among the competitors, Nordstrom was rated 1st along the 4 main KPI's while Macy's placed 4th.
Fashionable Spenders' Ideal Homepage
After we understood fashionable spenders' dissatisfaction on the homepage design, we asked them to come up with their preferred homepage design through a co-design session. In this session, they discussed their favorite retail homepage experience and created a low-fi paper version of their own ideal retail homepage with the assistance of UX designers.
We found 4 common themes through the session.
- Personalization: They expected to see product recommendations based on their preferences.
- Inspiration: They expected to see inspirational content such as editorial content.
- Social Proof: They looked to others as a source of inspiration, familiarity and product knowledge.
- Engagement: They wanted to feel more stimulated and engaged through interactive content.
Ideation
We developed 3 concepts based on fashionable spenders' feedback through a design sprint.
Final Design
The final iteration of the homepage redesign featured an increased focus on personalized and inspirational content that lead better user engagement while also keeping Macy's look and feel.
Customer Feedback
After the final design iteration, we interviewed the same participants and asked their feedback. Their feedback showed improved perception of Macy's homepage. Overall, they ranked Macy's as 1st or 2nd on all KPIs and provided the following positive feedback:
This feels so high fashion looking and personalized
I love this! I love it! It's so clean and elegant
It feels fun, simple, hip, and it feels like it's for all different ages
Outcome
Our stakeholders liked the new design and funded the redesign project which will feature some of the concepts we came up with. The new macys.com will be live in 2020-2021.
