Bed Bath & Beyond a Case Study
Bed Bath & Beyond was initially made up of 3 brands. Bed Bed Bath, Buybuybaby and harmon. Each having their own distinct product lines and a single UX team to support all 3 brands.
the challenge
How do you make an impact for a company that was heading towards bankruptcy from the day you were hired? I didn’t know it at the time, but within months it became clear the company was in trouble. This case study will be about that journey and how to still make an impact where possible.
I was hired for several key reasons beyond my years of retail experience and being a UX Manager. My initial objectives to accomplish were:
They had started the journey, but the design team was struggling to understand what it meant to “own the product”. I was to help the designers learn to work together and collaborate in a remote environment.
Some teams used Sketch with InVision DSM. Others used Figma and all used Zeplin and Freehand. The Brand/Marketing teams used Sketch and DSM and UX supported the DSM. I was to transition everyone to Figma and get a new design system created.
I found very little consistency across the teams. Each designer created their own files and structures. There was no one place to find designs from other product teams, so it became easier for designers to ask each other for files. Files where named and organized by year and quarter so it made it almost impossible to know where things where and what was the most recent. And, files themselves had no organizational structure.
There were few key factors that led to me being the last remaining UX person in the company. First, and I’m not sure if this is politically correct, but it surely is a leading contributor of people leaving. There was a C suite leader who basically was a tyrant. He would scream at the teams. Make then redo work as it was ready to go out the door and would send screen grabs of what other retailers were doing and tell us to implement it, he told the teams once that we didn’t need to talk to customers because he was a customer.
Our director quit within 2 months of me starting. After that, there started to be a steady exit of designers out the door. There were so many complaints against the tyrant, that when the new CEO took her official role, they forced him out the door, which turned everything around 180 degrees, but by this time, there was only 4 full-time people left and a few contractors.
By the end of 2022, we had to let go all the contractors, a manager quit and one was out on maternity leave, so coming into 2023 this left myself and two designers from a team of 15. We would become razor focused on what we were doing; anything to convert customers, but we couldn’t fight the out-of-stock rates for our products.
There were two more layoffs and then there was me.
accomplishments
So what did I accomplish during this turbulent time?
Transformation: The teams were at very different stages in the transformation. One key problem to change was the way the designers saw themselves. After years of working in a waterfall process, designers often look at themselves as order takers. Product will tell them what to do and designers go and produce wireframes. They didn’t see themselves as a single team working towards a common goal. To break this, the first step was to have the designers set up weekly working sessions with their Product partners and one of the session should be about getting to know each other and about the product’s goals and objectives, NOT about deliverables.
In the end, the whole product model broke down. With all the layoffs, people quitting and directives coming from the top, we ended up fulfilling design needs as best we could. One thing that did change, because the teams were so small, Design’s voice became more important. Because leaders set clear objectives, in the end, we become a product team working towards clear goals.
Software & Design Systems: I facilitated the creation of the Figma design system, this allowed the team to be completely on Figma. I held training sessions for designers who didn’t have as much experience. Started to get the engineers in Figma for specing and asset download. I worked with the marketing team to plan a cutover to Figma. In January 2023, the whole company transited over to Figma and this helped reduce our reliance on other systems.
Processes: What was the best way to organize a file to make it easier for designers to jump from product to product? I extensively reviewed how other companies handle design processes and designed a process based on Spotify’s. I created a Figma template and naming convention and had a few designers start using them as a POC. I also reorganized the folder in Figma to map to products vs year/quarters. Over time this made it easier for designers to switch between products.
To introduce the new process, I needed to educate designers on how Figma is structured and the different features available to use, such as branching and version history.
As we transitioned into the Team organization, I shared with the designs my POC. I also went in and set up the teams and projects so Designers would be able to easily get up and running.
I then documented how the new process should happen, from the initiation of a design effort to the final solutions put in a spec document that held all final designs as the source of truth.
Experience Cleanup: After the January layoffs a consultant hired by the CEO met with us and out of the meeting we decided to focus on cleaning up and to modernize the key shopping experiences for Cart, Checkout, Product detail page, and Search/browse page. He also made it clear I as the design leader was to drive this effort.
I helped coordinate the work with my Product partner to ensure we all stayed focused on the right things. Below is the journey of the experience cleanup work I designed.
experience cleanup
This has been the only time in my career that a top executive told a group of people that UX is making all the decision for the clean up (redesign) of our shopping experiences. Excited and nervous at the same time. We had no research team. Our A/B testing person was let go and so I had to have a plan to make sure the solutions I came up with were sound and successful. Luckily, I had 15 years of digital retail experience to pull from.
top problems
Because BBBy was late to the digital game, they were playing catch-up on everything in the digital space.
Designs hadn’t been updated in years and not all channels were consistent
Just copy "Target" was the go-to-way to solution problems
Throw the “kitchen sink” in the hopes of creating more sales
Lack of clear strategy to attract and retain customers
The one benefit during this time was the “noise” was removed. I no longer had to copy Target and I could work outside the confines of the past.
cart
NOTE: What you’ll see is mostly the desktop experiences, but I did mobile also and designs for Buybuybaby. The designs did not include the App.
Cart would be the first experience to be worked on as it would be the easiest to tackle.
The Goals and Objectives were, do no harm, get back to the basics, modernize the experience, and no big bang release all in the hopes of increasing clicks to checkouts.
To get back to the basics, we removed all modules that had nothing to do with why someone would be in the cart, and what we felt was getting in the way of checkout. By removing the noise we saw a 2.2% increase in people moving forward to checkout.
The next step was to remove the gray background to modernize the design. Due to resource constraints, we were not able to go further.
CART FINAL CONCEPTS
There was a lot of competitor research done and I’ve worked for most of the competitors at one time. I felt there were CTAs that should be consistent with competitors to make it easier for our customers; why change the wheel? Our CTAs were all over the place, and didn’t seem organized; this was my first change at the item level.
We removed the fulfillment choices and hid them under a slide-out. Customers would have already made the choice on the item detail page so we felt the noise on Cart wasn’t necessary, but if a change was needed a drawer would slide out.
I would take the design principles forward and work on Checkout. We hadn’t started engineering Cart yet, but there was going to be a presentation to the CEO to get her buy-in on the direction of the new designs.
checkout
The checkout experience was the worst I’ve ever come across; I am surprised customers spent time going through it. What I can tell the overall problem was as new fulfillment methods were introduced, checkout wasn’t re-designed, the new fulfillments were just squished in and hoped it would work.
The goals for Checkout would be similar to Cart. Do no harm. Keep customers on task by removing distractions and reducing the number of payment options.
If you look closely at the experience, it doesn't make sense; in today’s world of e-commerce, I can’t believe this was let go for so long.
My first approach would be to do a big cleanup of what we had today, leaving multiple steps. One key thing I noticed was, in the old design the steps really didn’t make sense. Sometimes there were 3 steps, sometimes 4, but everyone had to go through them all.
What I designed were just 3 clear steps regardless of the fulfillment. Now it would be consistent each time a customer went through it.
product & list pages
For these two experiences, there would be minor cleanup. For PDP, the buy-box didn’t feel finished or polished and as more products became out-of-stock, the fulfillment selectors made things feel negative.
Like the prior designs, the approach to test would be to roll in new pieces of the buy-box to see how they did before moving to the next piece. We also were introducing a new color for the Add to Cart button which would carry forward to Checkout and Place Order. This color would not be used anywhere else within the site. (original left, proposed right)
PRODUCT DETAIL PAGE
There was a cleanup done back in 2022 but didn’t feel finished. The buy-box area felt unorganized and as messaging needed to be added there wasn’t a strategy on how to handle it, so often it was just added anywhere it fit; this was a “just copy Target” solution.
The first area I focused on was creating two sections for the page. The left displayed the title, reviews, and images and the right would be the buy-box. The reasoning was products that had really long names, would display fully across the page, which made it harder to read and the buy-box underneath the title got lost especially the price.
We had complaints that the review indicators couldn’t be found so I moved the points indicator over to above the buy-box.
I did a lot of cleanup of the buy-box. The fulfillment cards felt really negative, especially when two options weren’t available. The previous designers would use big button CTAs for everything; I wanted to reduce this so the Add to Cart button stood out. I also created places to account for everything.
PRODUCT LIST PAGE
This was the last page I worked on right before the bankruptcy filing. I focused mainly on the item card, also removing the gray background. Like a lot of the experience at BBBy, they evolved by stuffy more information into a place instead of stepping back and having a strategy.
The current left, concept right
I stepped back and focused on what was important information. We didn’t have a lot of consumables, so most customers would click to the detail page so I felt having everything at this level wasn’t necessary or we could change how information was presented.
At the same time, I was working on a one-page checkout to align ourselves with the rest of the industry. We quickly agreed this was the right direction, so I pivoted to focus directly on the single-page checkout.
I pondered whether to make Checkout feel different than Cart, but in the end, it made sense to continue the same feel, this way we could utilize the same components which would make it more efficient to maintain.
Since this was a complete change from our current checkout, the team decided we would roll it out as an A/B test, make updates as needed then A/B again with more traffic until it was rolled out fully.
conclusion
Due to limited resources and ever-shifting priorities, none of the above work was implemented. We started to make progress with Cart by removing unnecessary modules, but no new designs.
I think the work above would have enhanced the shopping journey of our customers, but sadly bankruptcy put all of it to bed. It was interesting to find myself the sole UX designer for the company and have all questions filtered through me.
None of the designs were validated, but through competitor research and my years of retail experience, I felt confident rolling out our designs in bite-size chunks to our customers and then evaluate and pivot as necessary.
In truth, I had hoped the company would pull it around in time. There was a plan, but I wasn’t privy to the details of how bad the situation was so here I am.