Projects
Below are select projects I've had the opportunity to lead. For each I acted as creative director or executive creative director, but they represent the work of hundreds of talented individuals.
Health & Wellness Service Design
Through cross-functional partnership, rapid iteration, and broad research, the Walmart Wellness brand was launched in 2019 to better better serve Walmart customers' health needs and strengthen Walmart's business ecosystem.
Team: 4 designers, 1 design manager/project lead, 2 researchers, 1 content strategist
Duration: ~ 3 months
My Role: Head of Design, focused on design strategy, approach, and vision
Business Challenges
Walmart's health and wellness offering has historically been fragmented, with siloed priorities, budgets, and leadership across serval areas. The result was duplicative work and a customer experience that reflected the internal silos.
Walmart's health and wellness offering was also very transactional in nature, mirroring the approach taken with general merchandise. While this approach works well for cloths, toys, and groceries, it prevented Walmart from deepening engagement with customers on their health and wellness journey.
While some of the challenges stemmed from organizational design and prioritization, Walmart's health and wellness business was also held back by aging technical infrastructure. This meant that often times the best ideas did not win, but instead were held back by technology that could not support them.
To overcome these challenges it would require significant coordination, investment, and most importantly, change.
Project Goals
As a company with such a broad reach and scale, Walmart has the opportunity to define and orchestrate a cohesive ecosystem of products and services, setting a new bar for customers and the industry as a whole.
Holistic Service
With an industry that is fragmented and a current offering that has historically been siloed, it was essential that our new services support the customer across their journey.
Differentiated Offering
We needed to go beyond market parity and craft a health and wellness offering that pushes the market forward and exceeds customer expectations.
Keep Core Promise
Walmart's core promise to customers from its inception has been to help customers save money and live better. This new offering needed to be grounded in that promise.
With the strategy and visual language defined, we'll craft your story using 2D and 3D animation techniques, bringing your narrative to life for your audience.
Research & Insights
Organizational Design
To begin this effort, it was essential to reorganize the business vertical to support a seamless customer experience. To this end, I partnered with executive leaders from across health and wellness to bring all design, product, engineering and marketing under a single set of leaders with a single set of priorities and roadmaps.
In addition to this new org structure we began organizing teams using a "4-in-a-box" model, with each project team having clearly defined product, design, business, and engineering resources dedicated. This helped to mitigate unbalanced teams from being formed, created shared accountability across skillsets, and ensured that every product effort would have the right skillsets to be successful.
Scope of Work
The scope of this effort stretched across every part of the Walmart business, including product, design, marketing, brand, analytics, engineering, subscription services, general merchandise, and many others. For this case study, I'll focus on a few key areas.
Strategy & Vision
In partnership with business, product, marketing, brand, and various other teams we set out to better understand our customer and craft a North Star vison for a holistic health and wellness offering.
Brand & Marketing
In support of this new part of the Walmart ecosystem, a visual language was crafted that represented the brand and would resonate with customers.
Product Design
With greater insights into customer needs and behaviors, we crafted the future state health and wellness digital experience across all touchpoints.
With the business unit aligned under a central leadership team and utilizing new ways of working, we kicked off a series of qualitative and quantitative studies to better understand our customer's health and wellness related needs, their current healthcare journey, and their perception of Walmart's current offering. This effort spanned an initial 4 weeks, with additional studies conducted as needed.
In partnership with marketing, product, and customer analytics, we conducted multiple research studies that included broad customer surveys, ethnographic studies, co-creation workshops with current customers, and in-store intercepts. The teams came away with hundreds of data points that we then synthesized through several cross-functional workshops. Below is a selection of some of the activities and high-level findings.
Privacy
Customers expect to give more personal information to get their healthcare needs met...with the exception of SSN. Asking for SSN too early in the journey can be a red flag for customers.
Expectations
Customers are expecting to interact with their healthcare services the same way they do with other consumer services, with the same expectations around experience.
Confidence
In order to commit, customers need to see that they are in control of the aspects of the experience that are important to them (store, time, channel, etc.).
Trust
Customers are sensitive to both direct indicators of trust and more subtle indicators. "If you can save me money and you don't, how can I know you are looking out for me?"
Experience Strategy
Through a series of targeted, cross-functional workshops we began to define the strategic direction for Walmart's health and wellness offering. As part of that strategy we aligned on the core customer groups we would target, the business opportunities we would pursue, and the experience we wanted to provide our customers.
With full alignment across the leadership team, we began to craft strategic artifacts articulating the experience strategy and vision that would act as the North Star for the organization. This included consideration of both physical and digital contexts, as well as the individual touchpoints along the customer journey including in-store pharmacy, grocery pickup, web and mobile experiences, as well as standalone health clinics.
Brand & Marketing
Using customer insights and our newly crafted experience strategy as a foundation, the visual identity for what would become Walmart Wellness was crafted in partnership with Marketing and Brand. This included logo treatments, custom iconography, illustrations, and various collateral across both digital and in-store usage.
Product Design
In support of the new brand, we crafted several new digital and in-store services to more fully support customers in their health and wellness journey. These included enabling customers to digitally schedule various clinical services, a new digital Wellness hub on Walmart.com, and redesigning the current mobile pharmacy experience, which is shown here.
Boundaries
Unexpected positive moments are appreciated but care must be taken to respect existing mental models. "Why did you text me to ask how I'm feeling on my meds? That's for my doctor to know."
Price
Although price comparison/transparency in healthcare is in its infancy and not expected by customers, providing it where we can helps to elevate the perception of the entire servce.
Family
Thinking of customers only as individuals creates an inaccurate picture of who we are creating for. Our target customers play multiple healthcare roles, often across multiple households, geographies, and generations.
Priorities
For our target customer, convenience is a bigger priority than price from a healthcare perspective. Our services need to meet them where they are in their existing journeys, rather than defining separate journeys even if they are world-class.
Impacts
With the new organizational structure, defined strategy, and new product launches, Walmart is positioned to better serve the health and wellness needs of customer and lead the market.
Future Facing
With the new operating model and foundational experiences, Walmart can now better position itself as the trusted partner for customer healthcare needs and bring additional products and services to market quickly and cohesively.
Differentiated Offering
Since the launch of Walmart Wellness, we have created several new services including standalone health clinics, immunization scheduling, and expanded pharmacy services. Together, this creates a unique offering in the market to better serve customers.
Deeper Engagement
We have seen engagement in Walmart Wellness services increase exponentially since the brand launch. This includes 6% -18% increases in engagement with legacy services and demand that has outpaced capacity for new services, such as Walmart clinics.
