Shaping a unified direct-to-consumer vision for Philips
Brief debrief
By early 2018 Philips had its products spread across separate sites, and it wanted one. The “One.com” initiative was meant to bring the customer relationship, the brand and direct sales together in one place. I defined the UX strategy for this direct-to-consumer (DTC) vision: a new online shop that could support ambitious targets for the years ahead, including one billion visits and strong revenue growth.
Four tactics
The first UX challenge was turning tough business targets into an experience customers would enjoy. We built the strategy around four DTC tactics: an exclusive channel for hero products, a shopping journey designed to convert, personalisation based on smart use of data, and long-term relationships across every channel. We designed for the customer first and didn’t let the existing backend limit us, which gave Philips a clear north star.
Showing the business what is possible
To change a global brand, you have to show the business what the future feels like. The creative team designed the interfaces, and I built them into a clickable prototype. It followed one customer through the key moments, from discovering a priority product like OneBlade to signing up for a subscription. We cut anything too complex and kept the journey practical, to show how easy and enjoyable buying from Philips could be.
Support built into the shop
Customer care drove a quarter of all site traffic, but it worked separately from the rest of the site and leaned on expensive call centres. A big part of the new vision was putting support right into the shopping experience. Self-service returns, order lookup for guests and chatbots that could hand over to a person turned care from an afterthought into something that added value. One shared registration also prepared the way for a personal “MyHealth” area, as a base for long-term engagement and loyalty.
Explore more
Transcript
This project for Philips was an interesting one, because it was really a conceptual exploration. Philips had their marketing websites, where their products were featured and where you could read all about them, and then a separate website (the store) where you could buy them. They were exploring how these worlds could be brought together, without losing the brand and marketing side, and without losing, from the e-commerce perspective, any of their sales and the optimisations they do in that arena.
Our job was to create a vision of how these two could come together, and of how the journey would go: from discovery of a product to the purchase, all the way down to your profile area, your My Philips, where you would register the product and get benefits for doing so.
The whole exercise was very interesting. We did it at a very rapid pace, but we established some strong principles and really acted as a kickstarter for Philips to take this further.