Interviews 26 stakeholders across TNF & Vans, aiming to understand business priorities.

Themes for both brands included:

• Loyalty through community

• Experiential & beyond transactional

• Omni-channel

• Exclusivity, content, and personalization (product recommendations, content, messaging, etc)

Interviewed 30 Vans and TNF consumers, aiming to understand their mobile habits, attitudes, and expectations.

Emerging themes include:

• Convenient, saves my preferences, easy to navigate

• Speedy, saves me time, quick and easy transactions

• More personalized experience, deals, rewards

Read countless reports to understand key trends and consumer expectations.

Here’s what we found:

• Seamless registration: Reduce friction and time taken to sign in/sign up (auto-fill & biometrics).

• Meet user’s functional needs: Makes user’s lives easier and simpler.

• Blending experiences: Blend online and in-store experiences to drive engagement (beacons, BOPIS (Buy Online Pickup In-store))

• Loyalty and exclusivity: Drive loyalty with exclusive experiences (products, content, rewards, discounts).

• Multi-sensory experiences: Engage in a more personal way through AR.

Conducted competitive analysis of 11 direct & in-direct competitors’ apps (Target, Starbucks, Amazon, Peleton, & AllTrails, Nike, REI, Lululemon, Adidas). Features under review were: onboarding, m-comm/UX flow, personalization, geolocation and deals, loyalty and rewards, gamification, and lastly a summary.

• Target: Fuses loyalty, discounts and a digital catalog into a single platform to drive more sales volume, and ensure a seamless mobile payments (loyalty & omni-channel)

• Amazon: Focus on in-app exclusivity, especially for Prime members. Easy checkout flow. Personalized recommendations based on order and search history.

• Starbucks: Optimized toward earning more rewards signups, but it also provides practical features that directly benefit customers, like ordering drinks in advance for in-store pickup

• Peleton: Engages users and consistently puts out relevant content that makes users want to come back.

• Alltrails: User engagement heavily depends on user generated content. This gives the users a sense of giving back to the community.

• Nike: Loyalty/membership value is quickly demonstrated through exclusive and early access to products.

• Adidas: Tiered Loyalty program based on user engagement. Encourages users to “build your profile” during onboarding, to guarantee a personalized experience.

• Lululemon: Focus on community which in turn drives loyalty and engagement.

• REI: Offers value beyond m-commerce by successfully connect people to the outdoors through booking experiences on the app.

Unmoderated usability tests focused on: shopping, filtering, reviewing, checking out and adding a product to favorites. Brands under investigation: Lululemon, REI, Nike, Adidas, Allbirds, and TNF

Emerging pain points with our TNF app:

• Search: Search doesn’t fit users’ mental model

• Browse: Allows minimal autonomy over users’ browsing experience

• Wishlists: Unable to create wishlists & don't know where to access them

• Onboarding: Frustrated when there is too much required "information setup”

• Checkout: Process is friction filed, 15+ steps, no progress bar, and no autofill.

Areas of improvement:

• Personalization: How might we engage and personalize our users’ experience?

• Brand-consumer (emotional connection): How might we build stronger brand loyalty by highlighting on our brand values?

In order to know where we’re going, we need to know where we’re currently at. For this current state analysis, I created the categories based on repetitve critical points (research triangulation).

• Sign up, onboarding, app performance, checkout.

• Value beyond m-commerce, omni-channel experiences, brand-consumer connection.

• Personalization beyond first name, data privacy and permissions.