Online Product Catalog Rearchitecture
Macy’s is one of America's most well-known and popular retailers known for having the latest styles in fashion, beauty, home and beyond.
Situation
Macy’s relies on its commerce website as both a catalog of products available for purchase online as well as a way of viewing their store offering prior to making a visit, and so making the product structure intuitive and easy to navigate is key to success.
Customer feedback alerted the merchandising groups to the frustration of their shoppers, however rather than addressing the core issue and restructuring the content to model other retail shopping websites (and thereby making the products easier to find), they opted to add “related shops” and “shop by” groupings to the navigation within each section. Understandably, after many years of this, the site had become a nightmare to shop and a burden to maintain.
Challenges
For years, Macy’s has organized the products on their website based on department structure rather than a true product catalog hierarchy. Tackling this complex challenge would involve more than simply gaining a clear picture of the needs of their customer; it would mean confronting years of inertia and deeply ingrained, politically motivated decision making much of which had taken place prior to the current merchandising teams’ tenure. To varying degrees, each team recognized the need for change, but as only a small piece of the much larger merchandising organization, they didn’t have the time or interest in taking on such an involved effort.
Approach
I'd been working at Macy’s for several years and had built credibility and trust with other functional departments in the organization. Partnered with a fellow user experience designer and an internal research lead, we devised a strategy for how to approach the work. Rather than attempting to get buy-in first and then start the research, we conducted an analysis of the existing structure, completed a thorough competitive analysis, came up with and tested alternate product catalog structures with our most loyal shoppers and then went to the merchandising groups with solid research findings and recommendations.
Results
The effort produced moderate but encouraging results.
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initially there was a strong reluctance to change the way product was organized on the site
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concern that loyal customers would get confused or even angry and leave Macy’s to shop the competition
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willing groups experimented with incremental product catalog changes within their own category
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experimentation resulted in increased customer satisfaction
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additional groups became receptive to experimentation with their own product hierarchy
At the time I left Macy’s, only a few of the teams had implemented our recommendations but looking back at the site today, it's clear that many more came onboard over time.
