Through our stakeholder interviews and the personal experience of the design and development teams on various products, we identified areas of improvement:

We engaged first in a digital assessment that included a competitive and marketing analysis, journey mapping, and heavy ethnography. We also worked with their internal marketing and design team to start designing responsive website.

We found that many customers of their malls new about the company and were open to a mobile app. The stores also were encouraging a comprehensive app that would allow better connectivity and way-finding for larger mall locations. After an additional discovery and planning session, a mobile app was added to the roadmap and built out.

Website Trends Report

Project Expansion

Initially, we were hired to provide a shopper data strategy as part of a broader program of initiatives, including redesigning GGP’s main website, developing a mobile app, and driving customer awareness through improved digital channels. What started as a small collaboration evolved into a multi-year partnership.

As my team engaged in discovery and analysis of retail customers, we learned about the broader goals and activities of GGP’s program and surfaced new opportunities based on gaps, risks, issues, and innovative thinking. Transparently, we drove a holistic agile transformation, leaning into an agile mindset yielded quick successes for the company; allowing us to develop both a responsive website and mobile app for each of the properties that we could deliver quickly to the shoppers for that first holiday season.

Scenarios

Focusing heavy on the personas, we developed several scenarios, which utilized illustrated storyboarding, to walk through the primary feature sets.

Responsive and Scaled Design

Our designs prioritized the need for people to spend less time searching and more time enjoying the mall. We also wanted to show empathy by  utilizing a clean and simple design produced a goal-centric pathway for a user to find specific items mall-wide by searching for a brand or SKU number in the website or mobile app. We built a consistent design system within Figma, which established a greater level of control and transparency throughout the UX teams.

Results

The new digital platforms enhance the shopper experience and drive awareness to its retail tenants. Personalized features extend a shopper’s on-property time by locating nearby friends or connecting easily to in-mall amenities like movie theaters and restaurants.

Black Friday historically had been a major infrastructure challenge, so one of GGP’s goals was to be better prepared before Black Friday 2019. The new platform’s more reliable, scalable infrastructure easily managed the holiday surge of traffic to its websites and apps. There were 12,000 app downloads the week that the app launched—and no technical glitches.