A holistic evaluation of the Sears digital shopping journey ahead of the holiday season.
Challenge
Ahead of the holiday shopping season, Sears needed to understand how well it’s digital shopping experience was working from search to purchase.
Throughout the year, product and design teams had made changes across the experience but individual improvements didn’t necessarily reveal how well the entire journey worked together. The annual End-to-End Study allowed us to evaluate those changes within the context of the full shopping journey and understand whether they were making it easier for customers to find and purchase products.
Our goal was to identify remaining friction across the shopping journey and uncover opportunities to improve the experience before one of the most important shopping periods of the year.
* I cannot discuss specific findings or design recommendations but I can discuss the process and general outcome of the study.
Approach
Rather than evaluating a single feature, we examined the shopping experience as a whole—from search to purchase—across Sears' desktop and mobile web experiences.
Twenty participants took part across the Sears and Kmart studies. Participants completed realistic shopping tasks while we observed where they encountered friction, confusion, or barriers to completing their goals.
I moderated sessions, documented behavioral patterns, evaluated the experience against usability heuristics, and synthesized findings to identify recurring issues across the journey.
My Role
I helped plan and execute the study end to end, including developing the research protocol, coordinating participants, moderating sessions, documenting observations, conducting heuristic evaluations, analyzing findings, and presenting recommendations to stakeholders.
Insights & Impact
The study uncovered more than 25 usability issues across the Sears desktop and mobile web experiences, revealing friction throughout the shopping journey. Findings showed where customers struggled with product findability, purchasing, and, when applicable, store pickup.
We translated these findings into recommendations supported by behavioral observations, participant feedback, and session clips, giving product and design teams clear evidence of where the experience was breaking down and where improvements could have the greatest impact.
Design teams incorporated recommendations from the study into subsequent improvements to the shopping experience. Later research showed increased product findability and greater ease of purchase, providing evidence that the changes had improved the customer experience.