Walmart Digital Transformation
At Walmart, I led design for Grocery and gifting experiences, setting up the conditions that enabled pandemic-era grocery pickup and delivery, and facilitated the establishment of a design process for the entire design org. In 2018, well before the generative AI boom, I helped deliver a product-grade reimagining of Walmart’s shopping ecosystem. We aligned design, technology, and business strategy to unlock new customer value at scale through conversational UI, while advancing a more experimental, test-and-learn culture within Walmart Design.
Intro
Leadership approached me about a strategic initiative to rethink Gifting experiences. I had been facilitating Design Sprints in other areas, but this project turned Design Sprints from an experiment into a global Walmart process. The tight schedule propelled us from blank page to a clear vision for the new baby registry in a matter of days—proof of the method’s power. This concept also laid the groundwork for innovations like Sparky, Walmart’s AI enabled shopping assistant.
That’s me on the right!
During Ask the Experts, we generated HMW statements that we clustered into high-level themes.
We voted on the themes, to prioritize the most important problems to solve.
SME’s share expert insights
Ask the experts included a look at primary research and the needs of new parents.
During lightning demos, I captured the main takeaways for the team on a whiteboard. The resulting sketches were helpful in jogging the team’s memory during ideation.
One of my favorite exercises, is crazy 8s, 1 minute doodles of stand out ideas and remixes.
The Design Sprint culminated in a 16-grid collaborative storyboard, a visual scenario that demonstrated our end-to-end vision and informed the concept prototype.
A view into our Design Sprint room shows the frames from a collaborative storyboarding session. The scenario we captured helped inform the InVision prototype and mock chatbot which I created using Bot Society.
Research Sprint + Findings
We built a “baby bot” prototype in a Design Sprint, before the marketing team had finalized the character design, and tested it remotely with 30 participants across five states. It replaced a low-performing form-based onboarding flow, performed strongly in research, and shipped as part of the MVP.
Our Actors Share Reactions on the Prototype
🎁 Gift Givers
Our mascot was a hit, registrants appreciated the ease-of-use and cute factor.
Pre-populated items became a learning moment for new parents.
Want to start a registry from scratch or get guided suggestions by each category.
Want to approve the items being added rather than automatically adding them
Want ongoing personalized suggestions as the registry grows
Want items auto-group into dynamic categories as items are added
Link in-store purchases to the registry by scanning items with a phone
👶 REGISTRANT
Made it easier for gift givers to find available products and follow online shopping best practices.
Shoppers wanted to link their in-store buys to the registry by scanning with their phone.
Making it real
Following our Research Sprint, I partnered with engineering to build ADA-compliant, personalized color themes and worked with merchandising to deliver curated assortments. Ongoing UX improvements made registries easier to manage and drove better onboarding, larger registries, and higher sales. And the marketing and branding team turned our baby bot into “Hoo, the Owl”, we added Confetti at the completion of the registry for added delight.
The marketing team invented Hoo the Owl as the stand-in for our baby bot.
