Placement for personalisation and merchandising had not been formalized around the site, as a result any change required a time consuming process through the Ecommerce Team.
Discussions around personalisation and merchandising would start with a lot of energy and plenty of great examples, but soon lost momentum after the third meeting, which happened on more than one occasion. I believe that the number of variations and priority of messages may have been overwhelming to try and organise.
Without a structure and designated placement for offers/personalisation; speed to market was slow because it depended on the Ecommerce Team’s resource and availability, design was inconsistent and poor due to time constraints. In times of low trading it would cause all other development to stop in order to put the latest offers on the website as quick as possible, which was extremely disruptive.
So I decided to work on a solution, starting with some very quick sketches.
Disciplines & Responsibilities:
- System Design
- Research & Analysis
- Wireframing
- Presenting
The site has various objectives; this may depend on the current campaign, a person’s location, time of year, persona grouping or an inbound link. After some exploratory work on the homepage, I decided to leave out the rules for personalisation, as different personalised content had no bearing on where it should be placed on the page, this also helped in reducing complexity.
Gathering the various types of messages that were used, put them in order of priority and placed them based on their objective and proximity of related components.
By laying out some placeholders and attaching basics objectives to them, naturally lead the various messaging to place themselves. A few other considerations and prioritisation rules had to be made based on personalisation components, which lead to running through some worst case scenarios.
The solution is a framework that works in conjunction with a CRO tool such as Adobe Target, which reduces the development time for the Ecommerce Team, allowing more time for design, and increases the speed to market. Also by adding this structure will help guide any future work done on personalisation.
The following below, is the resulting framework, which was integrated into the site and became part of the marketing teams planning.
