The Nordstrom Universal iOS app project was intended to bridge the existing iPhone and iPad App shopping experiences. Nordstrom had inconsistent experiences in both visual design and interaction models. We had also observed a growing number of user accounts with both iPads and iPhone installs and wanted to craft a more seamless experience for those users. A universal app with one code base was an attractive solution to explore since we were also maintaining two code bases at the time. A universal app with a consistent experience would also make it easier for both the design and development teams at Nordstrom to quicklu produce new features and push changes to multiple devices.
I was the Lead UX designer on this project and I collaborated with a UX researcher, PM and another UX Designer on the project. We had the opportunity to do both quantitative and qualitative research to validate our designs throughout the project. We met with a variety of users that stretched across all of our target personas. I provided user flows, sketches, wireframes and worked with the other UX Designer on the visual designs for both iPad and iPhone. I also had the pleasure of working with both the mobile development architect and product owners on a strategy to provide a universal iOS shopping experience for our users.
We had the challenge of taking two experiences that provided essentially the same functionality but in different flavors and making them consistent for our users. We had to work with users to decide which experiences worked the best and aligned them on both form factors. Nordstrom did not have a universal app at the time and this was also uncharted territory for the development team as well.
We worked with our users early and often on the project to get feedback. I was able to collaborate with our UX research team on strategies that would allow use to quickly iterate on our designs based off the user feedback. We were able to show our users everything including sketches and wireframes to get feedback early. We tested key areas of the app including navigation, findability and ease of checkout across both device sizes for iOS.
The universal iOS app was redesigned with the mobile target personas in mind. We had 3 core iOS target personas and one of them was a multi device user who would benefit the most from having a consistent experience across devices. Our user testing was done with this target audience.
We learned that a consistent experience across both devices made it easier for users to continue their shopping experiences despite the form factor that they were on. Users showed us that our design approach was intuitive enough to work well on both small and large devices.
