The Visual Journal is an internal website for communicating product placement and sign guidance to all REI field employees.

Due to long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the current retail landscape is unpredictable and full of surprises. It has become increasingly important for our stores to pivot at a moments notice, to meet fluctuating inventory and customer demand. With a remote work-force and thousands of field employees across the country, the Visual Journal has had a major impact on visual merchandising at REI, allowing our team to communicate real-time updates quickly and effectively.

I was hired in 2019 to design the visual merchandising team’s new communication tool. It is a website and mobile web-clip hosted on Word Press VIP. In addition to the design of the platform, I also led the communication strategy and created all of the Figma templates and libraries that the visual merchandising team uses to draft content and design training resources.

With a lot of newly hired retail employees, training and development are more important than ever. Visual merchandising is a science that is proven to boost sales and customer conversion. Providing employees with the resources they need to do their best work ensures that science makes it to the sales floor.

Research & Site Traffic

Following the initial launch in 2020, I setup an Adobe Analytics dashboard and conducted an anonymous user survey one year after the site launched. The survey saw 327 volunteer responses and learned that the primary opportunities for improvement were improving the mobile UX, surfacing all updated content on the homepage, and prioritizing connecting relevant content on the site. I worked with a web development contractor to redesign the UX and hosted a series of listening sessions and Q/A tests of my prototype with several visual leaders from the field. This feedback culminated in the designs you see here, which will launch summer 2023 after some pilot testing this spring.

The user base for the website is primarily sales associates and visual leadership, with a smaller audience of administrative employees in merchandising and visual merchandising. Most users have limited experience at REI and in visual merchandising. Site traffic has over doubled in the past year, jumping from approximately 80,000 visits in 2021 to around 180,000 visits in 2022.

UX Design & Accessibility

This website needed to be mobile-first, easy to use, and similar the physical architecture of the stores, since that is how employees know to search for direction. Stores have iPhones, iPads and desktops in the field, but the iPhone is the most common device used by our visitors. There are 15 regular contributors to the content on the site and a viewership of hundreds of employees daily. It was important for me to design a tool that worked well for my team to work in as it was for field employees to use.

With a background in WCAG and UI design for assistive technology, I came to this project ready to prioritize the accessibility of the product and user experience. The components in the Visual Journal are mostly pulled directly from the Cedar Design System, which is used on REI.com. Recommended reading sections, tagging, and metadata ensure that relevant resources are connected and users can move fluidly throughout the site.

Login

The initial sign-on, guides users through some initial questions to build their user profile. At this stage, they will log their store, role, name and pronouns and primary use for the Visual Journal. Collecting this data allows us to better understand our users and make strides toward curating our content more intentionally. At this stage, users will also select an avatar icon, with an illustration-pulled from REI’s brand assets.

Home Page

The home page features newsfeed blocks surfacing the latest published training resources and floorset displays. There are also sections for our team to pin resources that we find to be the most important or currently relevant. Additionally, users recently viewed displays and guides are linked directly from the home page. In the user survey, I identified an opportunity to make it easier for users to return to the page they were on before a break or distraction from their floorset work. This way, if someone is mid-display set up when they need to help a customer with something else, or if they get logged out, they can easily return to the page they were working on.

Notifications

Whenever visual merchandising direction requires timely attention, a notification will appear under the bell icon in the top right corner of the window. Notifications are usually posted when we have to pivot VM guidance to accommodate late-breaking news, such as late product or signage. We use notifications to announce these revisions and link to other areas of the site.

Search

The Visual Journal has a search feature to help users quickly find posts on the site. Search includes filters to help refine search results and pinpoint a post or display.

Standards & Guides

The ‘standards & guides’ page is a directory of ongoing visual merchandising guides and training content that is meant to be referenced as often as needed to support execution and decisions on the sales floor. This portion of the site hosts all of the store and department standards, as well as other timeless VM resources.

Floorset

Seasonal visual merchandising guidance is posted in the Floorset. Floorset displays are specific product placement direction in focal areas and feature fixtures, to promote key items. These displays are updated throughout the year in alignment with merchandising and product deliveries, marketing campaigns and brand initiatives, as well as Member & Sale events. The Floorset is “always on” and is setup to be an auditing tool, where ‘latest updates’ represents what is coming and ‘today on the floor’ represents what should be set now. Floorset displays are often revised after publishing, due to feedback from the field or late inventory. I’ve included a variety of visual cues in the design of display pages to help users find where an edit has been made quickly.

Support

This is where users can go to contact the VM Communications and Training team for support. If users are unable to find an answer on the Visual Journal, they can reach out to us through the contact form. There is also a separate feedback form where users can submit their thoughts and ideas to improve both the platform and programming.

The Future of the Visual Journal

What started as a small but mighty team of two has grown to a team of six employees, managing this platform and working hard to deliver on the field’s growing need for visual merchandising training resources. This year our team is focused on updating all of the store and department standards and relaunching the website with it’s new design. Web design is a constantly moving target, where the trends in design and user behavior are always changing. Our team is positioned well to evolve with these changes and meet our employees where they are at. We will continue to study our site analytics, survey users and host listening sessions to identify where growth needs to occur.