How might you empower your team to Deliver Faster?

Wayfair | Design Management | Strategy

I led a 5-person team of individual contributors and design managers. I am accountable for the fundamental user experience of the product listing page (product grid).

There are 14 versions of this page across the main American Wayfair.com site. Add in four geographies (Canada, Germany, U.K., Ireland) and the four other Wayfair brands (Joss & Main, AllModern, Birch Lane, Perigold), and our scope is immense.

I created frameworks that enabled my team and other designers to design faster and more independently. The frameworks were so useful that other teams produced and adopted similar frameworks.

 
 

The Problem

Each specialty team designs nuance on top of the product listing page. For example, the German team changes dollar signs to Euros. The B2B team has special prices. The brands team wants images to be bigger.

My team was constantly flooded with requests while trying to work on our own roadmap items. We need a better way to empower other designers to design while maintaining the integrity of the product listing page.

 
 

How Might We…?

  • Help designers design more quickly and independently on the product listing page?

  • Maintain the integrity of the product listing page across all versions on all geographies and brands?

  • Help all designers understand how their designs on the product listing page affects other parts of the site?

 
 

Solution 1

Maintaining design integrity takes two approaches: Ensuring all designers have a common understanding and that designs adhere to that common understanding.

First, let’s make sure every designer understands component terminology and customer goals of the product listing page.

 
 

Using the customer goals, I then created a set of design principles based on user research findings over the years. I gathered feedback, and socialized it with all designers across all the teams.

Second, let’s make sure all designs adhere to these principles during and after it’s been built. We need to find a way to manage UX “bugs”. It was important to change the perception that UX bugs are “less important” than technical bugs. I partnered with a QA specialist and created new guidelines on how to triage bugs and the expected timeline by which they are fixed. I shared the framework with senior leadership and got buy-in.

Other teams in the larger organization found the severity scale useful and adopted the same scale.

 
 

Solution 2

It was also important to me that designers on the product listing page understand the context and how their designs affect the rest of the shopping journey.

I first created a customer journey map through the main parts of the shopping funnel to illustrate context and how designs flow across pages.

I also created a flow from the customer’s perspective. This flow highlights key questions that customers ask as they try to buy a product. The flow is independent of pages and complements the customer journey map.

 
 

Results

These frameworks reduced the number of requests coming into my team, enabling my team to focus.

Furthermore, the frameworks enabled other designers outside my team to design on the product listing page independently.

Lastly, these frameworks were considered useful that other teams across the shopping funnel produced and adopted similar frameworks.