Featuring:
Purvi Shah, VP of UX Design, Research and Accessibility at Target (pictured)
Jake Shah, VP of Technology at Target
Situation: evolving retail landscape
Target is one of America’s most well known multi-category retailers, with ~2000 stores and broad reach. In fact 96% of all US adults have shopped with the company. The retail giant is known for its curated, on-trend assortment, affordable prices, and ease of shopping via Same Day services and offerings. Some of the company’s recent innovations: delivering Starbucks coffee (and even cake pops) directly to customer’s cars along with Drive Up merchandise orders.
Target sets a high-bar for experience, referring to their customers as ‘guests’. Purvi Shah, VP of User Experience Design, Research and Accessibility, who joined the organization in late 2022 notes “our goal is to create welcoming experiences just like a gracious host would. We believe we are responsible for ensuring our guests feel a sense of warmth, value, joy, and ease through every interaction with our brand.“
Purvi shares, “When I first started working at Target and told people about my new job, there was one response I heard over repeatedly: ‘I LOVE Target’. And the consistent response of emotion makes sense, because in our stores, the newness, the merchandising, the value, the vibe, everything just feels right. There is this Tar-zay magic of discovery and affordability you just can’t get anywhere else.”
At the start of 2023 when consumers opened the retailer’s native app, they didn’t feel any of those things. While emotion and magic could be felt in Target’s stores, the digital experience was gray, static, and transactional. Purvi recognized the opportunity to raise the bar to better serve Target’s guests and the company, and she needed to help the collective team move fast. “It’s human-centered empathy and connection at scale; and while it seems easy, it’s not.”
Target was founded in 1962 and today’s retail landscape faces a challenging macroeconomic climate impeding growth, fierce competition from other retailers, technology is moving at a break-neck speed, and shifting consumer behavior is more fluid, always-on, and increasingly digitally-oriented.
Infusing a sense of discovery, joy, value, and ease into Target’s digital experience to strengthen relationships with guests was business critical.
Solution: redesigning the digital guest experience
“Just as we remodel physical stores on a regular basis, we set out to remodel parts of our digital guest experience.” said Purvi. And because digital is the front door to the total enterprise it was critical to quickly define clear outcomes and determine how each distinct function and business unit would activate towards this goal.
And, like any big mission, there was a deadline: holiday, the company’s peak season.
While the group had a good deal of guest research, strategic institutional business knowledge was not necessarily as accessible. Purvi’s approach built empathy for perspectives inside the organization:, “To uncover the magic and meet the near-term business need, we realized we needed to dual-path. Our UX team ran a design spike to identify quick wins while I partnered with my peers to go deeper. I personally ran a series of stakeholder interviews with many of our C-level leaders and critical senior partners to see through their eyes and understand their most differentiated business strategies. This combined with research, data, and a co-creative approach helped us identify which of our biggest guest pain points intersected with our most vital business opportunities.”
Purvi’s hands-on process helped the team to be both pragmatic and bold, charting a course for a remodeled digital experience before the holiday ‘peak’. At the same time it was informing a vision across multiple time horizons that the collective team, especially the triad of product, UX, and engineering, could rally around.
One of Purvi’s key partners, Jake Krings, VP Digital Engineering, shared "We refer to the triad with the addition of data science and the business working together as ‘One Team’. This highlights the value and trust we put on each other as we execute.” He continues, “Purvi and I often talk about the fact that it takes the collective expertise of all the functions. We need to each bring our critical thinking and experience–as well as directness, openness, and trust to help push each other’s thinking and work through messy moments. Because that is what happens when you are solving complex problems.”
An example of this complexity is ecommerce working seamlessly with in-store inventory. Many of Target’s digital orders are being fulfilled from their stores, the partnership needed between stores, supply chain and the digital experience team is critical. Additionally, the digital surface is also a key vehicle for Target’s membership program, Circle, as well as Roundel, the company’s media business.
The app redesign revealed another key role for Purvi and her team: At Target, UX is an enterprise-wide function and can act as ‘the glue’ across various business units and teams. She states, “It takes every team to work together to make magic happen for our guests. This means, we have an imperative to create seamless, easy to use team member and partner experiences because that is what enables the delightful experiences our guests need.”
But for a company that has been around for 60 years this isn’t easy. For Jake, the engineering lead, it requires trust, openness, and the ability to lead through change towards a shared vision to galvanize teams, work differently, and deliver in a short period of time.
Through partnership, insight, and a ‘one team’ mindset, the team accomplished what it set out to do: deliver a more joyful, inspiring, and seamless digital guest experience that also delivered business results. From improved navigation and search, to more relevant and personalized offers, to increasing ease of basket building and price transparency, to delivering more shopping ease through item substitutions and Drive Up Returns, and introducing more vibrant storytelling throughout, the team increased engagement, demand sales, and even won the Top 1% in search award from Baymard Institute. The team also achieved their goal of delivering in time for the company’s most high-traffic, high-sales time of year. With of-the season curation, micro animation, and more, guests felt the love– and the Tar-zay magic in a way they never had before.
While this was meaningful, perhaps the most exciting opportunities are yet to come. The north star vision inspired by the stakeholder interviews also led the team to organize around more strategic multi-horizon bodies of work across all disciplines. Jake, VP Digital Engineering, states, “Our approach not only brought the best of Target to our guests digitally, but helped us inform our multi-year strategy from a tech, microservices, and architecture perspective also. Having the UX team help us craft a tangible vision which enabled us to get alignment on what we want to go after a few quarters– and a few years out.” Purvi also shared “Together as a triad, we pushed ourselves to zoom out. We thought about what makes Target truly special, and how we can serve our guests across their entire journey with us. It’s not just about deploying a new feature, but the total end-to-end experience and how we can help our guests discover the joy of everyday life in a way that only Target can.”
Reflection: the power of weaving humanity and business together
Jake’s last comments were on Purvi’s unique value to the team, “Purvi brings an industry perspective. She is a thought leader not only in UX design and development, but in retail and that has been just incredibly valuable for us as we think about reinventing our digital experience at Target.” The hallmark of Purvi’s strategic design leadership may be the way she weaves human needs together with business strategy to drive bold, multi-horizon thinking with her partners as ‘one team’ in service of Target’s guests.
It is also clear that leaders and teams have a shared potential to not only anchor to empathy, but also redefine quality as the ability to elicit emotion. This spring, Target revealed a new corporate strategy with the aspiration to be ‘America’s favorite discovery destination’ and recently launched their re-imagined loyalty program. As the ever-changing retail environment continues to evolve, and as technology hurtles consumers to more transactional exchange, it will be important to double down on this idea: well designed experiences can create human connection and emotion. And that is magic.