Unilever stARTER KIT

A new template and tool library for Unilever’s North American Food & Refreshments and Personal care brand sites. 

I lead the research and design of Unilever's "Starter Kit", a website template and pattern system, during 2017-2018.  During my 5 month engagement I also worked closely with the development and design teams to translate our vision into a reality. This project is still classified as "in development" and is expected to go live during mid 2018. 

The challenge

Our challenge was to create a flexible design system that delivered a best-in-class user experience while accommodating the unique identity and functional needs of all North American Personal Care and Food & Refreshment brands (quite the mouth full). The new system needed to allow brands to quickly and cost-effectively create or optimize new or existing websites that adhere to modern web standards and meet WCAG AA compliance.

discovery 

Over a one week period we interviewed senior NBC stakeholders and held a discovery workshop that saw us identify 3 project objectives:

1. Reduce implementation and admin burden.
2. Support business objectives by providing clear paths to online sales and marketing initiatives.
3. Design for immediate and future needs and growth. 

Following the workshop we began diving into the analytical data of 10 of Unilever's existing brand sites and the previously developed category personas. While reinforcing our initial impression that product research would remain the primary utility of each site we were also able to identify several areas for optimization: 

1. Discovery: Provide more intuitive and meaningful paths to products and services. Existing data showed that 98% of users were leaving the site after visiting a single product page.  
2. Education: Motivate trial and purchase through demonstrated value. On site sales, where available, were sluggish with under 1% of users clicking the buy now button. 
3. Re-engagement: Build advocacy through mutually valuable exchanges.  
4. Design consistency: Reduce admin burden by creating a pattern library that allowed for easy maintenance and updates.