Product design tooling

Defining the suite of tools required to be a highly functioning product design team involves identifying the needs, the product design cycle, and the testing and research maturity of the company. The long process then begins - conducting RFPs, writing persuasive business cases, sequencing tool acquisition effectively, implementing, and finally ensuring success by providing guidelines for usage.

At Charlotte Tilbury, the only tool in use was Sketch. As Sketch only covers one point in the design process (the actual design!), I quickly identified a need for testing and customer insight tooling within the Product Design Team. Different tooling and enablers would be required within each of the key stages of design; discovery & inspiration, design & ideation, and Implementation & iteration.

DISCOVERY & inspiration

There was a severe lack of knowledge about the customer and their behavioural characteristic. The approach here was to collaborate with a 3rd party research agency to produce a set of customer archetypes, through digital diary studies, shopping safaris and ethnographic studies.

Design & ideation

All designs are built in Sketch.io however there was no way of; sharing designs, prototyping, or passing to engineering for build. Invision covered all these bases and was embedded within the way of working and is now widely used by; designers, engineers, product managers and business stakeholders.

To encourage a culture of validation during the design phase, we needed to enable testing with customers. Whilst we had the luxury of being able to go into our own stores or invite customers into the offices, there was no way to test quickly and efficiently at scale. Remote user testing was identified as the mechanism to fill this gap.

Implementation & Iteration

Once new designs went live, there was no easy way of understanding the impact of those new experiences, or the behaviour of customers on site. Opinions for best design solutions ran rife throughout the business due to the low maturity level of a test and learn culture within the company. As a result it was essential for us to have a way to engage with customers in situ, whether through AB testing, Voice of customer tools, or session tracking. With each of these solutions, we could; test and validate the impact of the change before rolling out to 100% of traffic, talk to customers contextually and in situ about their experience, and watch them using the website. This mix of qualitative and quantitative data made for a well balanced set of insight to build and learn from.

The outcome

  • Increased team productivity

  • A better understanding of our customers

  • Effective solutions for our customers.