Walmart: Helping customers save even more
Walmart asked product and design teams to conceptualize and explore new saving mechanism on their digital platforms. C-suite at Walmart.com wanted to inject fresh ideas using Jet.com's dynamic pricing ideas, to help with bulk purchases, fulfillment optimizations and last mile delivery. Walmart historically had been every day low prices (EDLP) but with this new strategy and thinner margins Walmart.com's site experience was identified as the key to give back even more savings back to the customers. Keepings Walmart's personas always in sight and bringing new business ideas a team of designers and product managers were brought together. Customers would be able to even lower their purchase prices depending shipping, bundling and bulk purchases through this program. We put design thinking and agile design sprints in action to ideate, iterate and research some divergent concepts.
Process Mapping
Since cost structures and pricing influencers are extremely complex for a retail business, we wanted to map out where savings are coming from Walmart's business that we can give back to our customers. Getting in to the weeds of pricing systems and levers in different departments helped us baseline savings amounts and establish shared knowledge.
Competitive Analysis and Design Principles (Heuristic and Value Proposition)
Knowing all shoppers at Walmart are price sensitive and deal seekers, we wanted to understand which of Walmart's biggest competitors do a good job of communicating pricing, benefits of shopping with them and their business proposition. We mapped shopping journeys and anecdotes to give us a clear idea of how to pricing plays a role in buying decision of an online shopper. As a result of analysis we measured their experiences based on a few key design principles that emerged out of rigorous SME discussions and workshops.
Gathering Research, Insights and related A/B test results
We had access to a wealth of qualitative and quantitive material. Researcher on our team helped us tap into all nuances around our personas shopping habits and price sensitivities. We analyzed material from previous user research sessions and other user researchers around what they have observed on the topic of pricing. Business intelligence teams and Voice of Customer teams were able to give us analytics around all savings and discounts programs and customer feedback collected through online message board.
Ideation
After ingesting all the business angles, savings mechanism and user insights we had multiple workshops and working sessions. We went broad and came up with specific solutions all at the same time. In the end we came up with a few distinct concepts that gave us a breadth of hypothesis to test.
Testing our concepts with users
Our researcher introduced us to a method called conceptual research where we take our broad concepts and write them up like a comic strip. We write stories and narratives that will explain the key effects of our various concepts and have users give us feedback around how they would value that concept.
