Organization

GameStop

Timeline

11 months

Responsibilities

User Research, Interaction, Visual Design, Prototyping and Testing, Management

Role

Interactive Designer, Marketer

GameStop Email and Website Redesign

Overview

GameStop, one of the world's largest video game retailers, ushered in a new era of tech-forward strategies in 2017 in order to improve customer experiences across channels: completely overhaul the ecommerce experience.

Leveraging DEG and Salesforce, GameStop wound up transforming its business to provide a better view of its customers, enhance the customer experience, and dramatically improve internal production.

As a lead part of the interactive team, I took innovative design ownership during the entire redesign process as well as nearly every email campaign.

ChallengeS

Simplify and merge the digital shopping experience. Email marketing needed to transform and coincide with the website redesign, in the middle of the busy holiday season.

Approach

Thoroughly listen to customers to provide them with a holistic, modern digital shopping experience that is engaging, dynamic, easier, faster, and tightly integrated with the stores.

Key Takeaways

These efforts saw increased engagement, clickthrough rates, and generally positive ROI.

  • PARTNERS: DEG and Salesforce

    STRATEGY: Andy Coates, Will Wood, Nicolle Wilson

    CREATIVE DIRECTION: Will Wood, Michael Wrenn

    INTERACTIVE DIRECTION: Andy Coates

    LEAD DESIGN: Chris Campbell, Rei Augustine

    DESIGN: Angelica Sibrian, DeRon Reese, Mark Gonzales

    LEAD DEVELOPMENT: Andrew Taylor, Blynn Mock

    EMAIL MARKETING DIRECTION: Sonia Williford-Gill

    COPYWRITING: Will Wood, David Harp

Understanding the problem

GameStop, its web, email, and overall online presence had worn past its wear. Not only was it garnering negative feedback from customers, but it was causing problems for internal staff, myself included, that inevitably slowed down the business as well.

During this time the company had restructured. I was quickly moved up to lead the interactive team and soon joined a diverse collaborate team. Once we were all aligned on the redesign, I pivoted to my research:

  • Uncovering pain points and discrepancies between internal and external user experiences;

  • Market research and competition;

  • Automation and intelligent content;

  • Creating and testing prototypes;

  • Card sorting exercises;

  • Streamlining work delegation;

  • Aiding in determining the success of the scoped work.

Gathering insights

Although this was an interactive project, Creative Directors from both the in-store and digital teams met once the investment was finally passed down to design. Even before our internal team—plus the partnered external agencies—collected data from intentional user interviews, the public opinion about GameStop’s website and digital marketing was easy to gather.

Scoping the work

The research led to four main sticking points of pain:

  • Clunky UX and UI with legacy pages suffering from linkrot;

  • Outdated infrastructure that bogged down lead time;

  • Low quality or no imagery despite an industry meant to be media-rich;

  • Poor accessibility.

It was clear why this project had turned into a multiyear, multimillion dollar investment… There was enough work to be done that it spread across 2 external agencies.

Designing the solution

I worked towards addressing these pains with a few key solutions:

  • Streamline end-to-end production through automation and sleek design;

  • Updating aesthetics, visual hierarchy, and language to modern standards;

  • Standardizing style and UI patterns across the board;

  • Opening up relations with developer teams

Work began in small bursts, not dissimilar to Waterfalling, as there was a large quantity of work to be delegated across departments. It needed to start small and work its way up, and as one of the leads on the Interactive team I did precisely that.

Though work on the website absolutely needed to coincide with the emails, my focus was spent heavily on the email environment.

Results and key takeaways

The complete redesign launched a few months after I left, though I kept a close eye on its release and can confidently say my contributions to the project were felt well beyond my leaving. The designs and direction I had a chance to lead wound up in the version of the website you see today, which seems to be improving more and more each year. It was a challenging but nonetheless rewarding experience.

After doing some research, I’ve found a few metrics that show a more efficient and effective data segmentation; Reduction in personnel overhead; 99.63% email deliverability; Lead-time improvement (production processes reduced from 18 to 10 business days).