Macy's Gift Registry

Inception

The wedding gift industry is huge. Over $12 billion for gift registries, with nearly as much additionally given as cash. Macy’s had neglected the user experience of their registry business forever. There were fresh marketing campaigns every 3 to 5 years, but no one had looked at the customer experience in totality. Registry hadn’t been properly funded in years, and it was in my part of the website. So when the VP and the directors wanted to make a case for funding, I was called on to supply a compelling story for the UX portion.

Vision

I was scoped to work only on the digital components of the experience. My role was to show what wedding registry could be (immediately and long term) and what needed to happen to get there.

Approach

After looking at over a decade of presentations, I realized a couple things: There wasn’t any reason for me to believe the numbers; not costs, timelines or returns. Additionally, the presentation design was lackluster at best.

Not about Numbers

I felt like, for this phase, numbers weren’t important. Customers were. Their stories had to be relatable and realistic. I was already using a presentation template I designed to replace the Macy’s template. I was reporting directly to two directors and I was partnered with a product manager. I told them all my plan and got the okay to get started.

Research

There was already a tremendous amount of great research done. It was scattered and need to be collected and reviewed. We found previous internal research, commissioned reports, and purchased research. The project manager and I went through hundreds of pages of research on trends, customers, demographics, market, competitors…you name it.

There was also concurrent research happening to inform changes to the registry in merchandising, fulfillment, marketing, brand perception, store space, and more. We pored over those findings as they became available.

Listening to People

Additionally, we hit the internet and watched video of customers talking about weddings, registries, and even going shopping. We talked to our registry consultants because they were a big part of the equation. We surveyed recent and current brides and grooms about their experiences. The project manager and I also hit a lot of stores as “a couple” and registered on dozens of websites. Taking photos and screen grabs along with copious notes.

Personas

It was important to tell the story from the perspective of registrants, guests and bridal consultants, since anything we did with the site would impact them all. Personas were created for 2 couples, 3 guests (one in the wedding party), 1 bridal consultant and 2 support staff.

Narratives showed Personas

We used them to make sure we covered the right users, and then put slide-friendly versions of the persona in the presentation. The story snippets fleshed out the persona better than a slide could. I even tried to interweave the stories of the personas, in an attempt to emulate movie character development. They ended up less interconnected that I envisioned, but it was for the best.

Journey Mapping

We had small group sessions with strategic and political stakeholders to capture the customer journey for each of the personas. For us, post-its on a conference room wall allowed a free flow of ideas, and flexibility in defining steps. We codified post-its as tasks, feelings, needs and expectations; then we gave them relative importance through the eyes of the persona.

Big Picture

I ended up with a “big picture” journey containing all the steps. So it was possible to show context for the different customer sub-journeys. This way the presentation could represent the ways different personas might experience the same step in the larger customer journey. After having a more formalized journey documented, we worked both individually and together to brainstorm ways that Macy’s could make money throughout the journey, in a way that the actors would appreciate.

Story Telling

There was a big list of journey steps, tasks, persona needs & expectations, and monetization ideas. I needed to connect them to a relatable vision for Macy’s registry.

Storyboards

It was at this point I got my first pivot from the leadership that the deliverables needed to be storyboard drawings. Thankfully, I went to art school. So, I sat down and drew out the story with captions so the leadership could react to this direction. It was socialized with good response. The leadership liked it but wanted to focus more on the stories instead.

Stories

I sequestered myself for a few days in a quiet room, so that I could write the stories. I wrote narratives for the registrant persona first. Leadership liked them and asked for more context for the stories. I included the journey steps as a timeline and showed placement as the presentation progressed. The next request was to itemize the features/ideas and categorize them as immediately doable or longer term. Then feedback was to include outside services in the stories.

Risk Assessment

Next I was asked to include the risks involved with each feature in the stories. To assess the risk, I simply made a spreadsheet with three columns: business impact, brand impact and technological impact. I gave each feature a relative score for the three, then averaged them. Finally I classified the scores as low, medium and high. Yep, that was it. But it worked.

Signed off

There was finally sign off on the first set of slides. It was good knowing what I was going to produce, but I had to do it again for the journeys of the guests and bridal consultants.

Bookending the Stories

The beginning of the presentation deck included slides to state the ux vision, describe the competitive landscape, and give context to the customer journey stories. After the journey story slides, I included ten building blocks Macy’s needed in order to execute the journey recommendations. The “blocks” touched on UX, merchandising, fulfillment, marketing communications, and lots of infrastructure improvements. They required money to be spent on both, cool new features and boring system modernization.

Delivery

The deck was designed so that it could communicate without being presented. I knew it would mostly be emailed around, based on how the first few slides were handled in the preview round. A final deck was handed off to the senior leadership and socialized up the chain. I never saw it presented.

Result

I got tremendous, positive feedback on the presentation. Everyone loved it. I was told by VP leadership that it was the best presentation they’d seen in 10 years. My directors were very happy.

It worked

It succeeded in getting funding for wedding registry projects for the next year and commitment for funding it in the subsequent year. The next quarter, there were two dedicated full-sized teams working on it.

Showed off

I was asked to present it to UX and creative, so they could repeat the formula. It became the “go to” way to sell UX to the rest of the company. It was an odd project for me, as I didn’t do a single wireframe for the project. It was just UX strategy and storytelling.