I was the Digital Business Analyst for the successful website replatform of a large UK retailer onto IBM WebSphere.
Business and Technical Analysis
I was involved in the workshops to define requirements and worked with business stakeholders, technical architects, testers and designers to finalise the requirements.
The ecommerce functions I was involved in included Product Information Management, Promotions, Personalisation, Payment/Refunds/Cancellations and Loyalty Programmes.
I gained extensive experience in the use of IBM Management Center (CMS), Google Analytics, Worldpay (Payments), BT Expedite (Order Management).
UX and UI Designs
I worked closely with UX and UI designers and business stakeholders to define the User Journey, ensure User Experience was appropriate and that the requirements accurately described the defined behaviours.
For example, when defining the behaviour of the Shopping Cart when we were dealing with a split delivery (different items in the basket would be delivered at different dates), we needed to ensure that this information was displayed in a user friendly manner and all scenarios were covered the designs e.g. how to deal with the order if one of the items was later found to be out of stock. The key was to keep the customer informed and in control of what they would like to do with their order.
Integrations
I also worked on Third Party Integrations, including:
- Worldpay, Metapack (delivery options),
- Peerius (product recommendations – now part of Optimizely),
- Bazaarvoice (customer product reviews),
- PayPal,
- Experian QAS (address validation software – now called Experian Data Quality)
Because of the growth in the generally market of mobile shopping, I also pushed for putting particular emphasis on the mobile journey. Some elements on the checkout journey needed to be streamlined to avoid the customer journey becoming too cluttered for the mobile user.
I also supported in the testing of key features and advised the test team with respect to test scripts.
Close to launch, I trained primary users in the E-commerce team in the use of Back Office features in IBM Management Center e.g. promotions management.
Conclusions
The project gave me an exposure to the full spectrum of business areas within an ecommerce department and it was great to the it through it to completion.
There were some interesting lessons from a business perspective:
1. Only build what you will use
The business had made considerable effort to push for additional flexibility in functionality that was available on the new platform e.g. being able to set a promotion against a specific size and colour of clothing, or showing different banners to different site visitors.
However it was found that such detailed promotions were never really used by the business afterwards, the use of different banners actually began to impact site performance when many users visited the site, and overall the ecommerce team was not large enough to utilise many new features.
When you also understand that all additional features also lead to a longer development and testing phase, its clear that with hindsight its important to be honest about what is really going to be used in a reasonable period post-launch, and if its not going to be used, then the business can consider for future releases instead.
2. Emerging trends will soon reach your customers too
Prior to the replatform, the majority of this retailer’s customer base did not use mobile devices to visit the site, so the business did not believe in focusing heavily in refining the mobile experience to be clean and fast. However it was soon apparent post-launch that mobile visitors were increasing, and the mobile journey was therefore improved.