Ralph Lauren
At Ralph Lauren, I've been fortunate enough to learn a lot about what happens on the client-side. I've learned a lot about what it takes to upkeep a site, the business and technological constraints, communication with stakeholders, and so much more. I had the time to learn basic Omniture, watch in-home usability testings, perform card sorting/tree testing exercises, and test different experiences online — all things I didn't have time to do when I was at an agency. I also grew to understand how the ecommerce world and the brick-and-mortar stores work together to create an omni-channel experience. I also got a first hand view of how the internal teams functioned as a whole. Below are just a few tidbits on what I worked on during my time at Ralph Lauren.
UNDERSTANDING THE USE OF REAL ESTATE
One of the first things that I dove into was trying to understand how the space on different pages were used. I worked with a merchant and an analytics guru. We started with the homepage and did a 12 month look back to see how the real estate was being used and how each promotion performed. First we had to take a look at all the different types of promotions and categorize them (i.e. Sale, Ecommerce Promotional, Seasonal Promotions, etc). Once we did that, I was able to put together a chart that showcased for the past 12 months the types of messages that were on the homepage at one time, the number of days each homepage ran for, the number of change outs that occurredand the number of different types of messages as well. The analytics guru was then able to help push this farther by adding information on what types of messages performed the best, the number of messages we should have at one time, etc. From this, we were able to present back to the rest of the business what we learned to help with the upcoming redesign and content strategy.
WHAT TO DO WITH A MULTITUDE OF SIZES
Another project that I worked on was fixing the filters in the search results. This project required an understanding of what was technologically possible on the third party ecommerce platform. One of the things that I really wanted to focus on besides making the user experience better overall was the Sizes Filter. Ralph Lauren has many different brands and categories that contain many different sizes. The first thing that I noticed was the inconsistency from product to product especially within the Home division. Sometimes a size for a photo frame would say 'One Size' and another one would say '5x7'. From there, I made a list of all the inconsistencies that I was seeing so that we could start updating the product feed with the correct information. After that, I started going through a list of all the sizes that we had on the site and started grouping them so that it was easier to use.
A/B TESTING GALORE
Because there were a lot of technological constraints, we started using a third party testing platform to make our site better. We also started testing many different user experiences on specific pages to see which performed better. Some of the tests performed were:
Duplicating the 'Proceed to Checkout' button on the Checkout Page which had an incremental increase in users getting to the next step.
When I first started, Ralph Lauren had just updated their pagination functionality. After doing this, they found a huge drop in revenue so we did a few different versions to find the best solution.
