Mary Ellen Larter

Scope of work:
• Restructuring Taxonomy
• Enhancements to Search Typeahead
• Redesign of Storefinder experience
• Redesign of My Account experience
• Expanded flyouts and content surfacing
• Fully responsive build (on a website that is otherwise adaptive)

53 Total Stakeholders

Timeline - 4 months from start to finish (including discovery work, user testing, card sorting, design, prototyping, proof of concept, additional user testing, development, QA and beta release).

My role:
• Design lead
• Fully responsible for discovery work, taxonomy strategy, UX, UI, interaction design, journey mapping and prototyping
• Partner in analytics review, KPI creation, user testing (discovery phase interviews and prototype testing), development support (pairing methodology), and visual and functional QA.

This work actually started out as part of The Home Depot’s first ever Design Sprint Workshop (adapted from the Google Ventures model). We wanted to build a homepage experience that was more indicative of our in-store “Aprons” experience. Customers told us that one of the things they love the most about coming to The Home Depot is they get to know the people in the stores. They can come in, ask someone a question, and the next time they come in that person remembers where they are in their project and asks them about it. Our front-line associates have a personal understanding of our repeat customers, and we wanted to create an online experience that offered up those same benefits.

The homepage is one of the least hit pages on our website, but if you see it, it’s because you directly typed our name into your web browser. You already have a relationship with us or a reason to come to us. We wanted to find a way to honor that relationship in a way that was meaningful and helpful to our repeat customers.

While working on a squad designed to optimize the experience for customers browsing for inspiration on Pinterest (and that ultimately land on homedepot.com from the app) we created a more seamless flow from Pinterest to our website and back again. We knew that helping customers see the vision was important, but actually giving them the ability to make that dream a reality was an even bigger part of our success in HD Home. 

These pages were launched alongside a large in-app “Shop The Look” program featured here.

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Goals

1. "Softer Landing"

We found that in most cases, users seemed to be startled when they were taken out of the Pinterest app and thrown into a product page from a retailer. We wanted to give them a softer transition and help prioritize the information they were looking for. We stayed primarily image focused and relied on qualitative and quantitative data points to reprioritize content on the page.

2. Respect the Top Funnel Journey

We wanted to respect the journey point of our Pinterest user. We recognized that they're typically at the top of the funnel, so instead of only giving them one option, we injected carousels of other product options that might be of interest to them based on data science models and signals from their browse path. We also connected products from collections that go with the product they've landed on, giving them the ability to price out an entire scene or room.

3. Complete The Look

We know that one of the primary struggles for our HD Home customer coming from Pinterest is completing a room based on an image they love. We worked to build out thousands of room scenes based on our full HD Home and HD Core inventory and are pulling these items together into collections. For the Pinterest landing page we're surfacing the rest of the products within a collection based on the image they previously interacted with.

Shop by Room pages can play an important role in décor customers journey in helping them get Inspiration for room ideas and discovering our product assortment.  However, the previous landing pages were manually built static pages that only contained 12-15 curated room collections. The redesigned experience was a dynamic Shop by Room page that allows for an unlimited number of looks that can be filtered by style, color, room type, main feature, popular, trending on Pinterest, and more. This redesign allowed us to share more rooms with customers in a meaningful way, and funnel them through to styles that most match their preferences.

As a company, Dick’s Sporting Goods was relying heavily on external agencies to build out custom experiences and microsites for their highest performing brands. The Nickent project was one that was initially slated for an agency, but was stalled because of budgeting issues. Because it sat on the list for so long, I picked it up as a fun side project - then pitched the designs to our marketing senior director. I built the microsite in two weeks with one other developer and it became the first of many marketing assignments our team was awarded.

One of my first big mobile projects was the design of our (at the time) brand new mobile app for Dick’s Sporting Goods. We were starting from scratch and the code work for this was done out-of-house, so it was mostly a completely brutal waterfall process. This was the most complicated projects of my career at the time and prepared me for my work at The Home Depot as the principle mobile designer.

Dick’s Sporting Goods launched an initiative aimed to inspire women, as well as expanded their entire women’s clothing line. This experience primarily viewed by referring traffic and an intense ad campaign. We built an experience that looked more editorial than many of the other pages at the time.

When DSG partnered with the NFL, we pitched this site experience to them. As part of the partnership we built out their web experience and navigation as well as took on their regular design work for the website.

When Nike, Reebok or Adidas launch a new shoe - it’s a big deal. Mostly people think of customers lined up at stores, but there’s also an online side to it. We built a custom experience for our sneaker fanatic customers that showed them all of the released shoes and updated for each new release. Some shoes would sell out in a matter of minutes, others a matter of days, so the experience was flexible and accounted for shoes that were already sold out.

An example of the destination pages I’d build regularly as a designer for Dick’s Sporting Goods. These landing pages would be build for catalog launches, each sport season, special holidays, and special initiatives or launches.

Military Spouse was essentially staffed by two members – the Art Director and the Editor-In-Chief. As the Art Director, I was responsible for designing and directing all aspects of the Military Spouse brand including the monthly magazine, website, social media pages, media kits, event packages, marketing materials and advertisements.

I also scouted and directed models, photographers, illustrators and designers (all active military spouses) as well as managed the creative budget for the brand. I directed media and cover shoots with photographers, stylists and advertisers and guided the creative processes and final products for freelancers and staff contributors. Organized and managed events both in person and remotely.
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For the January issue I also created illustrations for the maternity feature.

Military Spouse was essentially staffed by two members – the Art Director and the Editor-In-Chief. As the Art Director, I was responsible for designing and directing all aspects of the Military Spouse brand including the monthly magazine, website, social media pages, media kits, event packages, marketing materials and advertisements.

I also scouted and directed models, photographers, illustrators and designers (all active military spouses) as well as managed the creative budget for the brand. I directed media and cover shoots with photographers, stylists and advertisers and guided the creative processes and final products for freelancers and staff contributors. Organized and managed events both in person and remotely.

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For the March issue we scheduled an entire fashion photoshoot with one of our amazing military wife photographers, Liisa Roberts, on a battleship on Naval Station Pearl Harbor and a helicopter field on Marine Corps Base Hawaii. As with all of our shoots - all models, stylists, makeup artists and assistants were current or former military spouses, personnel, or former “brats.”

Military Spouse was essentially staffed by two members – the Art Director and the Editor-In-Chief. As the Art Director, I was responsible for designing and directing all aspects of the Military Spouse brand including the monthly magazine, website, social media pages, media kits, event packages, marketing materials and advertisements.

I also scouted and directed models, photographers, illustrators and designers (all active military spouses) as well as managed the creative budget for the brand. I directed media and cover shoots with photographers, stylists and advertisers and guided the creative processes and final products for freelancers and staff contributors. Organized and managed events both in person and remotely.
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The original photoshoot fell through at the last minute, so I got on the phone with my best photographer and ran through the ideas we thought we could pull off in a week. Liisa pitched a vintage fashion shoot in a bamboo field near her house, and called her friends to see who would be up for modeling. It ended up featuring two military wives (a first ever for the brand) neither of which had ever modeled before. This issue ended up breaking our (at the time) best-seller cover and we got more positive feedback on it than any other previous issue.

Military Spouse was essentially staffed by two members – the Art Director and the Editor-In-Chief. As the Art Director, I was responsible for designing and directing all aspects of the Military Spouse brand including the monthly magazine, website, social media pages, media kits, event packages, marketing materials and advertisements.

I also scouted and directed models, photographers, illustrators and designers (all active military spouses) as well as managed the creative budget for the brand. I directed media and cover shoots with photographers, stylists and advertisers and guided the creative processes and final products for freelancers and staff contributors. Organized and managed events both in person and remotely.
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We had literally no budget for this issue, so we had to do a lot of scraping together for the May Issue. This cover was actually shot in our Editor-In-Chief’s apartment with an Air Force fiancé, in her actual future wedding dress. Our featured spouse said we were the first people to see her wedding dress because she had just picked it up two days before.

Military Spouse was essentially staffed by two members – the Art Director and the Editor-In-Chief. As the Art Director, I was responsible for designing and directing all aspects of the Military Spouse brand including the monthly magazine, website, social media pages, media kits, event packages, marketing materials and advertisements.

I also scouted and directed models, photographers, illustrators and designers (all active military spouses) as well as managed the creative budget for the brand. I directed media and cover shoots with photographers, stylists and advertisers and guided the creative processes and final products for freelancers and staff contributors. Organized and managed events both in person and remotely.
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The August issue featured the first ever military kid on the front cover and the back-to-school photoshoot allowed us to partner with the PX and a ton of military spouse crafters and sellers. Running a photoshoot with 15 kids and their parents was a logistical circus, but our photographer, Athena Plichta became one of our favorites after this one.

Military Spouse was essentially staffed by two members – the Art Director and the Editor-In-Chief. As the Art Director, I was responsible for designing and directing all aspects of the Military Spouse brand including the monthly magazine, website, social media pages, media kits, event packages, marketing materials and advertisements.

I also scouted and directed models, photographers, illustrators and designers (all active military spouses) as well as managed the creative budget for the brand. I directed media and cover shoots with photographers, stylists and advertisers and guided the creative processes and final products for freelancers and staff contributors. Organized and managed events both in person and remotely.
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September was another low-budget month. We ended up leveraging personal photos from one of our regular photographers of her hikes around the many bases she’d lived on. The cover featured a close friend of hers and she said, “We’ll just go on a hike, and I can take some pictures.” Luckily, Liisa had lived in Hawaii for so long that it was actually painful choosing from her thousands of beautiful images.

Military Spouse was essentially staffed by two members – the Art Director and the Editor-In-Chief. As the Art Director, I was responsible for designing and directing all aspects of the Military Spouse brand including the monthly magazine, website, social media pages, media kits, event packages, marketing materials and advertisements.

I also scouted and directed models, photographers, illustrators and designers (all active military spouses) as well as managed the creative budget for the brand. I directed media and cover shoots with photographers, stylists and advertisers and guided the creative processes and final products for freelancers and staff contributors. Organized and managed events both in person and remotely.
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One of my favorite things about this photoshoot is that, at the time, I was really into sewing aprons. When we had an entertaining theme one of our photographers pitched a vintage shoot inspired by a really old protocol handbook for officer’s wives that she’d found. The feature poked fun at some of the old traditions, and there was an editorial piece that followed it that called on spouses to set their own traditions. For the shoot, Athena asked if I would send her the aprons I’d been making, so I shipped them off to her and it was so fun to get the pictures back and see them in use.

Despite the cutesy look, this feature, and editorial piece after it, ended up making this our most talked about issue. Traditional readers were upset with the perspective on time-honored traditions, while new spouses appreciated the humor and responded with a resounding “Thank God someone’s saying it.” It initiated an entire rebranding of the magazine as we were finally forced to identify which side of the line we were falling on.

A feature based on Lily Burana, a spicy military wife and American writer whose publications include the memoir I Love a Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles, the novels Try and Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America.