Role: Designer Management, Lead UX
Team: UX designer, UI designer, Frontend engineer
Lloyds retail pharmacy extends across eight countries each run and managed by local teams. Besides platform fragmentation the primary objective for this project was to consolidate the divergent approaches to their eCommerce interfaces through the creation of a unified design system.
My work fell largely into two parts; managing a dispersed set of stakeholders; which included the group digital director, territory eCommerce directors and technical heads, as well as leading the design team's approach and delivery.
Business Challenge
To consolidate and improve the customer experience across the businesses website ecosystem.
Customer Insight
Business units are unable to rapidly respond to new opportunities due to limitations in the interface and CMS.
Experience Vision
A unified design language across the business that enables each territory to respond consistently and effectively to new opportunities.
Process
The first step involved work to uncover the extent and depth of the current state. Activities we used to do this included auditing the existing ecosystem of websites to compare the content, features and UI, gathering roadmaps and requirements from stakeholders, reviewing analytics and usage patterns and researching best-in-class examples.
We worked collaboratively with the various stakeholders, holding workshop sessions however with stakeholders located across Europe we blended this with remote participation. Being remote and in many languages presented communication and collaboration challenges that I handled through video/web conferencing, Confluence and a fair amount of cajoling.
From here we were able to begin synthesising the findings. Common patterns were established and baseline experiences defined which territories could pull from. We ensured the goal of a unified interface was achieved whilst also allowing territories a degree of flexibility to represent the nuances of their local customers.
“Thank you Neil and for all your effort – DEL has really landed well and enabled us to deliver some market leading capability across multiple countries / sites that otherwise would not have been possible”
Structuring the approach with initial research
Component based design, demonstrating the differences across territories but all using the same base components
Component specification
Responsive system in practice, applied to the home page
Outcome
We established the foundations for an atomic design system that could be evolved and grow with the business. We also produced a set of core pages that demonstrated the system in practice and guidleines for the territories.
Personal retrospective
This project was about momentum and expectations. I inherited the project after it had kicked off and there wasn’t budget for a project manager but the agency still expected the project to be delivered to spec, time and all that usual stuff. Deliverables were promised to the client that would have required a time machine to meet and the quality of output was not where it needed to be.
I took conversation out of individual inboxes and setup a shared confluence project space so that all communication was transparent. I addressed and reset delivery expectations and brought the client back onboard with the project.
I worked closely with the UX and UI designers to help structure their output and demonstrate the level of output we needed to aim for. As talented individuals they rose to it and produced high quality work, they just needed a nudge.
Methods
Atomic design
Workshop facilitation
Quantitative research
Wireframes
Component specification
“It was a pleasure working alongside Neil on the Betterlife project, he’s a natural leader, has great experience and is dedicated to the team and project. He excels at supervising, guiding and motivating the team. With a laid-back and approachable attitude he allows others to stay on task and focus on producing great work.”