In 2018, Forrester predicts that customer-obsessed, data-driven retailers will thrive. That’s why General Growth Properties knew it needed to re-envision the shopping experience for its retail tenants and their customers. That meant discovering ways to merge the ease and convenience of shopping online with the immediate and personalized experience of shopping in-store.
GGP set out to enhance every step of the shopper’s journey across digital and physical touch points, from finding parking at each property to offering unique, personalized promotions—all on a user-friendly mobile app driven by a new digital design practice and strategy.
Goal
While GGP had maintained a strong digital presence for many years, we helped them realize their consumer platforms needed to become more dynamic to create a richer customer experience: To drive more awareness and traffic to malls and support its core B2B business.
Approach
We engaged first in a digital assessment that included a competitive and marketing analysis, journey mapping, and heavy ethnography. We also worked with their internal marketing and design team to start designing responsive website.
Through our stakeholder interviews and the personal experience of the design and development teams on various products, we identified areas of improvement:
We engaged first in a digital assessment that included a competitive and marketing analysis, journey mapping, and heavy ethnography. We also worked with their internal marketing and design team to start designing responsive website.
We found that many customers of their malls new about the company and were open to a mobile app. The stores also were encouraging a comprehensive app that would allow better connectivity and way-finding for larger mall locations. After an additional discovery and planning session, a mobile app was added to the roadmap and built out.
Website Trends Report
Project Expansion
Initially, we were hired to provide a shopper data strategy as part of a broader program of initiatives, including redesigning GGP’s main website, developing a mobile app, and driving customer awareness through improved digital channels. What started as a small collaboration evolved into a multi-year partnership.
As my team engaged in discovery and analysis of retail customers, we learned about the broader goals and activities of GGP’s program and surfaced new opportunities based on gaps, risks, issues, and innovative thinking. Transparently, we drove a holistic agile transformation, leaning into an agile mindset yielded quick successes for the company; allowing us to develop both a responsive website and mobile app for each of the properties that we could deliver quickly to the shoppers for that first holiday season.
Experience Strategy, Psychographics & Metrics
The new digital channels were designed with the user in mind, increasing convenience and efficiency, eliminating pain points, and delivering meaningful, personalized content to the customer.
We utilized curated psychographics to focus our metrics that would drive the improvement of the new experience.
Scenarios
Focusing heavy on the personas, we developed several scenarios, which utilized illustrated storyboarding, to walk through the primary feature sets.
Responsive and Scaled Design
Our designs prioritized the need for people to spend less time searching and more time enjoying the mall. We also wanted to show empathy by utilizing a clean and simple design produced a goal-centric pathway for a user to find specific items mall-wide by searching for a brand or SKU number in the website or mobile app. We built a consistent design system within Figma, which established a greater level of control and transparency throughout the UX teams.
DesignOps for the Future
Atomic Design-based System
Allowing scalability and growth during GGP’s digital transformation was paramount for our delivery. We established an atomic based component system that collaborated virtually effortlessly with the development teams structure. Integrating with Frontify, the design system was ”live”, which connected through API’s and their repositories to push updates that was driven by UX and the marketing teams.
Results
The new digital platforms enhance the shopper experience and drive awareness to its retail tenants. Personalized features extend a shopper’s on-property time by locating nearby friends or connecting easily to in-mall amenities like movie theaters and restaurants.
Black Friday historically had been a major infrastructure challenge, so one of GGP’s goals was to be better prepared before Black Friday 2019. The new platform’s more reliable, scalable infrastructure easily managed the holiday surge of traffic to its websites and apps. There were 12,000 app downloads the week that the app launched—and no technical glitches.
Ryan Dodd
Intuitive, user-centered experiences aiming for delight and empowerment