Dick’s Sporting Goods
Product Launch Experience
“Coming up, you got new sneakers and you had to run outside to make sure everyone saw. You’re expressing yourself. That’s just part of the culture... This isn’t new.”
My role: Senior Product Designer
Team: Two - I worked closely with a Product Manager on this; we were paired together. The Dynamic Duo.
Goal/Focus: To create a new Product Release Experience for the Dick’s Sporting Goods (DSG) app, which will bring DSG into a new light and be seen as a contender in the Sneakerhead space.
Understanding Context
Stakeholder Interviews
Conducted stakeholder interviews to grasp a better understanding of where leadership, business, engineers, marketing, and others were looking to ‘take’ this new experience.
We also wanted to understand Business and Tech requirements.
We gathered all insights and synthesized them to glean common themes from our stakeholders.
From this, we put together our initial product vision/mission statement and defined the opportunity space
Research
User interviews
Exploratory research to glean insights into a sneakerhead’s mindset.
Develop preliminary personas/archetypes
Gain knowledge to utilize for the direction we’d like to take for the Product Launch experience within the DSG app.
We synthesized all of the insights gleaned by affinity mapping to see what common themes came to light.
Insights from over 20 interviews and distilled via affinity mapping exercises.
Competitive/Comparative Analysis
We conducted some competitive research to level-set and have an understanding of what other companies were currently doing in the same/similar space
Heuristic Evaluation
Used the heuristic evaluation as an inspection method for to help to identify usability problems in the UI Design. It specifically involves evaluators examining the interface and judging its compliance with recognized usability principles (the "heuristics").
Synthesizing
Themes from synthesizing our research.
After gathering all of this impactful and useful information, we began piecing together artifacts to share out:
Service Blueprints
Modular Persona
Athlete journeys
HMW statements
We were now ready to involve even more of the team by sharing this all out and prep for our workshop
Design Concepts
We conducted a workshop with folks from Business, Marketing, Engineering, Product, Design, and more.
Not only to share out our research but to generate out-of-the-box ideas for this new experience.
Post workshop
After synthesizing the ideas that the group came up with, we began to mock-up low-fidelity screens to test quickly, gather feedback, and iterate upon these designs.
There were two key areas that needed attention for this experience to be fruitful and cater to the pain-points of our Athletes.
A new and improved way to enter releases that didn’t require users to have to manually wait on a screen, that didn’t allow them to do anything or leave, in order to get through to a product page.
An updated Release Calendar for which Athletes could enter releases from.
Detailed Designs
After usability testing the low-fidelity concepts and updating the designs based on the feedback received, we began to create high-fidelity designs
We tested these as well and made improvements where/when necessary
Release Calendar
Example of how Athletes can enter the Release Calendar, enter/view products and Draws, and more.
Also, there was an ask from Leadership to include new marketing components on the calendar, which can be seen here.
Marketing Components
Since the Release Calendar lives on both app and web platforms, the new marketing spots needed to be considered across the board.
Checkout Modal
A ‘single page’ checkout is a net-new feature for the DSG app as well. So we had to take into account this experience/flow for when an Athlete enters a Draw and their information is, or is not, pre-populated for them.
Prototype
Outcomes
This new experience will only live within the DSG app. Not on web. And since this is ALL completely new functionality for DSG:
While the experience/flow isn’t new or ground-breaking when compared to other companies out there, there are still some open questions that need answering (from a backend standpoint) that are currently being discussed and worked-through.
While all teams have aligned on the proposed design/flows, there may be changes necessary as engineers begin to build the new backend systems needed to drive this experience
For example, the DSG app does not have a means to collect entries and communicate to its users via push notifications because push notifications are currently powered by adobe.
One work around for this may be to use SMS text messaging as an MVP (because we know from our research that email is the least preferred method of communication)
There are also HUGE open questions on how bot mitigation will function and how we’ll be transparent to our users about this.
There are many other open-ended questions but we are confident that we will deliver a best in-class Product Launch experience for sneakerheads and non-sneakerheads alike.