Giant Tiger

Giant Tiger is the go-to destination where Canadians can shop smart and save smart with everything they want and need at a price they can feel good about.

https://www.gianttiger.com/

Project Summary

My Role

Working as part of the dedicated UX team, my role involved close collaboration with team members, including the UX Lead and Senior UX Designer, to address various UX aspects throughout the project. This collaboration extended to presenting findings and recommendations to the client.

My Work Included

User research
Stakeholders interviews and workshops
Psychographic personas
Information architecture
Design strategy and principles
Wireframes and prototyping
Annotations

Challenge

Create a seamless omnichannel experience that supports self-service options and store pickup, while preserving GT brand and increasing value propositions to new and existing customers.

Solution

The final design needed to be functional & and maintainable. Key features and callouts include:

Core Categories: A flexible navigation system that drives traffic to featured subcategories/collections.
Cohesive Experience: Consistent design and repetition for familiarity and user confidence, following the visual style guide that reflects the Giant Tiger brand.
Custom L1 Landing Pages: Eye-catching visuals and creative storytelling to build trust and engage customers when exploring the brand or products.
Micro Animations: Interactive elements that guide user interaction.

Discovery & Research

The project began with immersing our team in the client’s internal documentation, consisting of white papers, business objectives and strategy, and personas for existing segments.

While the client asserted that their rebrand was intended to expose them to new demographics (GT’s brand perception was a central theme to the project) we felt it was vital to interview both customer support team members and customers in their physical stores. From these interviews, we were able to understand how Giant Tiger fit into their lives, and how the physical stores met or missed these needs.

We applied these learnings in workshops with the GT leadership team, creating new personas with a psychographic approach (making the distinction between users who had shopped at GT vs users who had not), and then conducting customer journeys with the leadership team.

Personas and UX mapping workshop

The end output of this work was the Design Strategy, which distilled their overall business strategy, and understanding of users into a document outlining the digital design approach, design principles, and additional features that aligned with their business model.

Design Strategy Principles as part of the Strategy Deck

Wireframing & Solutioning

The wireframing team comprised the UX Lead and two UX Designers, including myself.

To optimize efficiency, we strategically divided the templates among us designers, focusing on overlapping functionalities as a central driver. My specific responsibilities included designing the IA, Mega Navigation (Panel was chosen), Search Functionality, Account and Store Locator Flows, PLPs, Community, and all Static Pages for both Desktop and Mobile.
Collaboration was a key element of our process. Regular reviews, feedback sessions, and discussions with the UX Lead and the other designer were conducted to gather insights, receive critique, seek advice, and collectively find solutions before presenting to the client.

GT Department Structure

Information Architecture,Version A

Information Architecture, Version B /

Live example with Hero Categories

One particular challenge was the Buy Online, Pickup in store (BOPIS) functionality. Through user and Customer support interviews we identified a common trait of skepticism, and lack of trust from users.
The BOPIS functionality (and homepage community driven content) hinged on being able to predict a user's nearest store. We mapped out user flows that detailed how different approaches to geo-location would work for users, and the cascading effects and error risks each approach would have.

The client had already decided at a business level that mixed carts (some pick-up in store, some ship to home) would not be feasible, so the user had to have a
store applied at the beginning of the experience.

The end solution was to use presumptive geo-location to get within a radius of the user’s location. This could be achieved without asking the user for their location, which in interviews users had identified as a red flag.