Put Away the Scissors

Originally, the Great Deals page was a simple landing page with a handful of manually curated deals and categories updated weekly. Customers were expected to print out the page and use the coupon at a store. Eventually, it was linked to a promotion on site, but it was a limited manual process.

The Initial Plan

The concept of the Great Deals Store was simple: showcase weekly deals in a convenient location. However, the actual experience and how it was generated was complex. This initial wireframe sketch kicked off the direction of the overall page layout, product cards, and data structures.

Cross Functional Design

The Great Deals Store was an important part of the Toys"R"Us and Babies"R"Us ecommerce strategies. In addition to designing the front-end user experience, I designed the cross-functional team workflow to simplify and streamline the process to make it easier for everyone to successfully setup and launch this weekly experience.

Merchandising teams would create spreadsheets of sales data that would then be passed onto our Web Operations team. They would then curate the data and hand it off to the Web Development team to format and publish live on site.

Creating Data

Talented colleagues on the development team created a backend tool to automate the manual process of creating the JSON data from spreadsheets. They integrated my store engine so that our cross-functional team members could edit their data and see it render in real-time. I worked on enhancing the UX for that tool in parallel to the actual application.

Instructions Included

I created presentations, manuals, documents, and an internal website to support the creation and usage of the Great Deals Stores for both technical and non-technical team members. These educational materials helped everyone understand exactly how and why things worked the way they did. They also gave everyone confidence in using the applications and responding to any issues throughout the pipeline.