Design Within Reach — Ashley Seguin

Making Design Within Reach for online shoppers

Project Goal

Create a truly exceptional, customer-centric e-commerce architecture that can scale across all of Herman Miller Group. Herman Miller Group is our family of brands, including Design Within Reach.

My Role

Responsible for visual design, discovery and ideation, user research

Team

Kylie Crocker, Product Designer
Caraline Visuri, Product Designer
Raechel Mackenzie, User Experience Designer
Carl Dunker, Digital Content Strategist
Jeremy Abrahams, User Experience Design Lead
Ryan Ganns, User Interface Design Lead
Eric Ishii-Eckhardt, Director of Digital Design
BASIC®, Agency

Agency Partner

We partnered with BASIC® to refresh the brand expression and create and underlying scalable architecture.

Roles + Responsibilities

Immersion + Synthesis

Customer Research - Herman Miller
Experience Strategy - Basic®

Strategy + Concepts

Brand Expression - Basic®
Product Design Wireframes - Herman Miller / Basic®

Design Execution + Guidelines

Product Design Visual Design Styleguide - Herman Miller / Basic®
Iterative Customer Research - Herman Miller

Implementation

Development Execution - Herman Miller / Basic®

Immersion Synthesis

We had two in-person workshops where both teams came together to set the tone for our collaboration through out the project. At the beginning project kickoff, we shared out audience research and customer insights that our team had conducted at the start of the project. We aligned on ways of working together as well as a shared tool stack. Together both teams conducted a series of stakeholder interviews to gain a clear understanding of the businesses top concerns and establish priorities. The information we collected was later synthesized into an experience strategy deck.

After a one-week immersion we outlined a list of benchmarks for the experience that were aimed at improving engagement, conversion, and overall company revenue.

Experience Strategy

We worked with Basic to establish design principles around the new digital experience. On-site immersion, user testing, and countless brainstorming sessions between both teams helped to inform our strategy. Key takeaways and insights were translated into creative briefs and a design system that spoke to business and brand aspirations.

Customer Research

We did 80+ customer interviews and identified the areas we could make the biggest impact on our customers' journeys. We distilled these into 57 common user journeys and prioritized four that we felt best represented customer motivations, needs, and pain points. Through testing these journeys, our goal was to improve the consideration phase for all customers through improved guidance and more educational content.

Experience Vision

Collectively, both of our teams aligned on crafting a branded experience that’s curated, dynamic, engaging, and optimistic. We wanted the new DWR.com to be a place where customers can explore and find inspiration—helping them write the stories of their homes.

Strategy + Concepts

We curated a collection of swipe together as a group based on the features, which stemmed from the “how might we’s” from the strategy deck. By framing each challenge as a "How Might We question, it allowed us to approach each challenge as an opportunity.

Design Execution + Guidelines

We established a refined typographic system, a detailed color strategy, and all-new UI components focused on bringing DWR’s modern personality to the forefront of the experience.

Exaggerated spacing and thoughtful use of color are at the core of the design language, aimed at creating focus on the brand’s world-class content, as well as developing a sense of editorial rhythm as you explore key pages.