Steven Hien – Nordstrom

Nordstrom

Streamlining asset uploads for content creators

About Nordstrom

Nordstrom is a Fortune 500 luxury department store chain that offers an expansive selection of products. With great offering comes a great collection of assets. The team receives and catalogs thousands of images every day manually.

The Challenge

Nordstrom tasked us with creating a centralized portal to streamline asset transfers for their vendors (e.g. photographers), using out-of-box components in Abode Experience Manager.

Design Team

Direction
Gianna Giancarlo

Visual
Heather Adorna
‍
My Role
Product Designer

Deliverables

Interviews
Task Flows
Wireframes
Edge Cases
Interface
Prototypes

Research

We spent two weeks uncovering user and business needs by conducting stakeholder interviews and platform audits of Adobe Experience Manager. We then defined key tenets to drive the design direction of the product.

Discovery Session

Stakeholder Interviews

Through a series of stakeholder interviews, we gathered user pain points, clarified our assumptions, and understood the specific file requirements for uploading assets.

Platform Audit

To understand what was feasible within the AEM platform in terms of functionality and interface design, I held working sessions with our in-house engineer team.

Design Tenets

Clear information architecture

Lay out a structured page architecture to provide users with orientation of where they are in the flow and what to expect next.

Step-by-step
advancement

Encourage users to progress forward by presenting an organized information hierarchy in forms, guided navigation, and call-to-actions.

Timely pertinent feedback
‍

Provide users with feedback—such as tooltips, error states, and confirmation alerts—where they may get stuck along their journey.

Approach

We spent three weeks analyzing the user’s journey in uploading assets and formulating the critical functionalities for the MVP, by outlining key user tasks, user flow, and wireframes.

Wireframes

Asset Upload

The most critical user goal was to be able to quickly take action toward uploading assets. Immediately after login, users were presented with a split-screen work area, a familiar pattern in file management products.

Feedback States

No one ever wants to hit a dead end. In order to create users’ confidence in the product, we prompted them with relevant information and error states throughout the upload process. A bold confirmation alert rewarded the user for finishing their task.

Error States

Success State

Forms + Selector

It was vital to keep the assets organized for both the vendors and Nordstrom end-users. To ensure accurate and complete metadata entry, we designed clear forms and date selectors with text style hierarchy, logical order, and shortcuts.

Execution

We spent two weeks creating mockups to ensure that the visual language helped guide the user along the various flows of the product by using bold colors for alerts, gray scale for text hierarchy, and familiar iconography.

Outcomes

We successfully shipped the MVP, replacing Nordstrom’s previous ad-hoc email system for uploading assets. The new centralized portal enabled vendors and end-users within Nordstrom to transfer, organize, and track assets. Building the product on AEM with out-of-box components allowed for speed and scalability. In the future, the adaptable MVP could be enhanced to offer additional services to Nordstrom and its vendors.

Minimum viable product

Streamlined workflow

Scalable platform

Retrospective

Both the client and I were happy with the quick and decisive delivery of the MVP. Though, I would have liked to interview other primary users to understand the more nuanced inconveniences that they run into when uploading and managing their assets. We primarily based our solution on client feedback and personal photography experience. I think what we delivered was a solid basic start to a system that could be much more robust. In any case, our solution was a major improvement over the manual submission process that Nordstrom had been using.