From Print Magazine:
Words by: Lauren Blass, Snr Director of Digital Strategy and Planning and Sal Bolaños, Creative Design and UX Hybrid Leader, Mirum.
Recently, Walmart.com slowly began rolling out its new user-centric redesign. With the site’s contemporary look and feel, Walmart is focused on appealing to a broader base, as well as providing its customers with a tailored experience based on their previous purchase history and what’s trending in their area.
Walmart.com 2.0 prioritizes both form and function. Aesthetically, the site has a much cleaner look with a focus on relatable photography and products that are featured in a contextual setting. According to Mark Lore, President and CEO of Walmart US eCommerce, “Our goal is to make it compelling for customers to shop for whatever they’re looking for—whether diapers, laundry detergent or a new dining room table. We’re also expanding our color palette and adding fonts to bring more vibrancy and depth to the site.” It is evident that putting the customer first is and will continue to be the primary focus for online shopping moving forward.
And that’s not all Walmart is doing to improve the customer experience. Below, FOUR noteworthy user-centric design topics are outlined that play a significant role in expanding opportunities for marketers and making customers lives’ easier and more convenient.
Revealing A New User Interface & Visual Design
With Walmart’s clean, fresh lifestyle design, it is apparent that Walmart.com is aiming to drive market penetration and steal customers from Amazon, particularly the valuable older millennial customer. This more affluent segment is important to Walmart because they are heavier online shoppers and are at the life stage where they are forming life-long purchase habits. They enjoy spending time discovering products, which is more in line with the functionality of a lifestyle site. Walmart’s recent acquisitions of Bonobos, Modcloth and Moosejaw have created an opportunity to capitalize on those sites’ features to become more of an aspirational destination with look books and curated content vs. Amazon’s product marketplace.
Contextual imagery is also enabling the site to put products into real-life usage occasions and help customers envision the products in their own lives.
See the stark contrast to Amazon’s digital warehouse of products. For example, if a customer is looking to purchase a tent on Walmart.com, he or she could see how the tent looks within a camping scenario and view other options that could be useful for their trip. On Amazon, the customer is only able to see the particular tent they’re searching for without the contextual setting.
Beyond the visual basics like photography and fonts, Walmart has also moved away from its heavy blue header bar, and has transitioned to a more modern user interface design system with isolated elements to help them stand out. Elements like the search field now stand alone. This change simplifies the toolbar which helps users quickly access the most frequently used features of the site.
Finally, the new Walmart.com includes an expanded Tips and Ideas section that features inspirational lifestyle content like recipes, decór and fashion trends, entertaining ideas and more. This section has a trustworthy, blog-like feel that allows Walmart to serve products to customers in an untraditional way. The content is also sharable, which adds to the blog-like nature of the section and encourages the customer to engage more deeply with the content.
Personalizing the Experience
Functionally, the site is heavily focused on personalization based upon the individual’s behavior like browsing and buying, as well as their location. Several of the new features include top-selling items trending by location, and services that are available in a particular area—online grocery pickup, order status and easy reorder functionality. Online grocery pickup is one example of Walmart pushing for better integration between its online business and mobile apps with its 4,700 physical locations.
Reordering
Opportunity: Once an item has been purchased, it will be placed into the Easy Reorder list. Whether items have been purchased in-store or online, consumers will now be able to easily revisit the list of all items that they have ever purchased to quickly reorder.
Implications: Targeting switchers and new market entrants with steep discounts to receive first placement on the reorder list should be an obvious marketing spend. The return is more akin to earned media value because consumers who were incentivized to purchase will always have that product at the top of their reorder history....MUCH MORE
