Shaping a UX strategy from the ground up.

I started with a deep dive into Hero's three-part platform: the shopper-facing Web Plugin, the store associate Mobile App, and the "All Doors" analytics dashboard used by retail partners.

The team walked me through their top-level product process, which allowed me to recommend immediate actions and map out a set of UX activities to address the company's biggest blind spots at the time.

To get a clear picture of the company's vision, goals and internal assumptions about the product and its users, I organised, moderated and synthesised 12 stakeholder interviews across all levels of the company.

I identified 12 common themes and 4 clear contradictions across the board, surfacing the biggest UX gaps, setting clear research goals, and opening up a handful of new product concepts to explore.

I kicked off multiple projects to increase the number of direct conversations with Hero's retail partners, introducing the concept of Client Advisory Board sessions (CABs) and strengthening the store visit process.

CABs pair a user interview with a usability testing session, tailored to the type of users we were talking to. I prepared, moderated, recorded and synthesised the first batch of CABs with 8 partner teams, alongside a handful of in-store research visits.

To keep users at the heart of every product decision, I designed a set of prototype personas: six profiles for Hero's typical B2B "Partner" users, and two for its B2C "Shopper" users.

Each persona captured context, goals, behaviours and frustrations for its user type. While initially based on internal assumptions, they were updated continuously as new research findings came in.

Site and app maps had existed in the past, but hadn't been maintained. The design team would occasionally add blocks to the experience without keeping a bird's eye view of the platform.

I designed individual maps for the Web Plugin, Mobile App and All Doors dashboard. Each map had two versions: a Live version reflecting the current product, and a Design version for upcoming features. All maps were assigned to designers and PMs to keep them continuously up to date.

One of the key objectives of the UX strategy was to find an effective way to measure the overall quality of the platform's user experience over time.

Using Google's HEART framework, I drafted UX metrics dashboards for the Hero App, Plugin and All Doors, outlining goals, signals and specific metrics for each of the five HEART categories: Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention and Task Success.

Throughout the engagement I spent a lot of time searching for the right tools to streamline Hero's product design process, covering in-app feedback, usability analytics, usability testing, surveys, session recording, prototyping and research documentation.

As the Product team migrated its knowledge base to Notion, I created Hero's UX Hub: a single home for every UX document, report, process and research insight, shared company-wide and continuously updated.