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Lead Story

# Office Depot / OfficeMax

## Homepage / Selected Work Card

### Designing Revenue Back Into the Purchase Path

**Office Depot / OfficeMax · Retail Commerce**

At enterprise scale, small moments of friction become major business problems.

For Office Depot, the opportunity was not simply to modernize screens. It was to redesign the moments where customers hesitate, lose confidence, miss savings, misunderstand fulfillment, or abandon the purchase path altogether.

As **Design Director, Digital**, I helped lead a 26-week commerce initiative across cart, checkout, account, loyalty, and product discovery — translating customer friction, legacy constraints, and business goals into mobile-first experience patterns designed to improve conversion, AOV, retention, and checkout completion.

**Impact**
A 14-basis-point conversion lift and $2.34 AOV increase modeled nearly **$48M in one-year revenue opportunity**.

**Focus**
Commerce UX · Design direction · Checkout optimization · Mobile-first design · Loyalty and account flows · Accessibility

[View Engagement]

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# Full Engagement Page

## Designing Revenue Back Into the Purchase Path

**Office Depot / OfficeMax**
Retail Commerce · Experience Design · Conversion Strategy · Mobile-First UX

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## Lead Story

At Office Depot’s scale, experience friction was not a minor usability issue. It was a business issue.

A confusing coupon. An unclear delivery option. A buried reward. A checkout step that asked too much, too late. Each moment created hesitation. And across millions of shopping sessions, hesitation had the potential to become lost revenue.

As **Design Director, Digital**, I helped lead the experience direction for a 26-week commerce modernization effort focused on the moments that mattered most: cart clarity, checkout confidence, delivery decisions, payment completion, rewards visibility, account engagement, and product discovery.

The work was not about making OfficeDepot.com look newer. It was about making the purchase path work harder.

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## The Business Problem

Office Depot needed to improve the performance of its core digital commerce experience while operating within legacy technology constraints, complex fulfillment logic, coupon and rewards complexity, and evolving customer expectations shaped by modern retail leaders.

The work centered on four business goals:

* Increase conversion
* Reduce cart abandonment
* Increase average order value
* Improve retention

The design opportunity was to translate those goals into practical, visible changes across the customer journey.

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## My Role

I led design direction across the commerce experience, shaping the UX and visual approach for key transactional and shopping flows.

My contribution was not limited to oversight. I directed the experience strategy, guided the team’s design decisions, shaped the visual direction, and personally drove many of the interface decisions across cart, checkout, account, loyalty, and responsive commerce patterns.

The work required design judgment at multiple levels: what to simplify, what to elevate, what to remove, what to make visible, and how to create a better experience without exposing the complexity of the systems underneath.

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## Design Challenge

How do you make a legacy commerce experience feel modern without pretending the constraints do not exist?

We focused on the moments where users were most likely to pause, question, backtrack, or abandon:

* Can I get this when I need it?
* Is pickup, delivery, or shipping the better choice?
* Did my coupon work?
* Am I getting my rewards?
* Why is checkout asking for this again?
* Can I trust this total?
* Am I ready to place the order?

Those questions shaped the work. The goal was to make each decision clearer, faster, and more confidence-building.

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## Design Response

### Make buying feel easier

We simplified cart and checkout flows, reduced visual noise, clarified form structure, improved error handling, and created stronger forward motion through the purchase path.

### Make value more visible

We brought more clarity to savings, rewards, coupons, gift cards, delivery timing, pickup options, inventory signals, payment methods, and order totals.

### Make complexity feel manageable

We created reusable patterns for payment, addresses, rewards, delivery methods, gift cards, errors, session states, and review-order flows — helping the experience feel more consistent even when the underlying systems were complex.

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## Impact

The work focused on high-value commerce moments where incremental UX gains could compound into significant business value.

* A **14-basis-point conversion lift** modeled **$27.8M** in revenue opportunity.
* A **$2.34 increase in AOV** modeled **$20M** in revenue opportunity.
* Together, conversion and AOV improvements represented nearly **$48M in modeled one-year revenue opportunity**.
* The work targeted a cart abandonment reduction from **70–75% to 68%**.
* The experience strategy also supported retention through clearer account, loyalty, rewards, and reorder patterns.

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## Outcomes

* Modernized cart, checkout, account, loyalty, and product discovery experiences.
* Clarified high-friction moments across delivery, payment, coupons, rewards, gift cards, and order review.
* Created mobile-first responsive patterns for critical shopping and purchase flows.
* Improved consistency across transactional, browsing, and account-management journeys.
* Developed practical UX solutions within legacy backend and platform constraints.
* Connected design decisions to measurable business goals across conversion, AOV, abandonment, and retention.
* Established reusable patterns for continued commerce optimization.

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## Visual Story

### 1. Commerce Moments That Matter

A montage of cart, checkout, payment, delivery, rewards, account, mobile, and product discovery screens.

**Story:** This was a connected purchase ecosystem, not a single-page redesign.

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### 2. Small Changes at Enterprise Scale

A KPI visual showing:

* Conversion: **4.71% → 4.85%**
* AOV: **$117.66 → $120.00**
* Cart abandonment target: **70–75% → 68%**
* Modeled opportunity: **~$48M**

**Story:** Small improvements can become major business value when applied at scale.

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### 3. Checkout Confidence

A before/after showing the shift from fragmented checkout friction to a clearer, mobile-first flow with sticky summary, visible savings, better error handling, and clearer payment/delivery decisions.

**Story:** The work reduced hesitation at the highest-value point in the journey.

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### 4. The System Behind the Screen

A component/state grid showing payment methods, saved cards, gift cards, rewards, address states, delivery methods, error states, and session timeout.

**Story:** The design created reusable patterns for complex commerce behaviors, not just polished screens.

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## Short Version

At Office Depot’s scale, small moments of friction carried major business weight. As **Design Director, Digital**, I helped lead a 26-week commerce modernization effort across cart, checkout, account, loyalty, and product discovery — simplifying high-friction purchase paths, clarifying delivery and savings decisions, and creating mobile-first patterns tied to conversion, AOV, cart abandonment, and retention. A 14-basis-point conversion lift and $2.34 AOV increase modeled nearly **$48M in one-year revenue opportunity**.

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## Confidentiality-Safe Version

Led design direction for a national retail commerce modernization effort focused on the high-value moments where customers decide whether to continue, hesitate, or abandon. The work simplified cart, checkout, account, loyalty, and product discovery experiences, introduced mobile-first responsive patterns, and connected design improvements to measurable commerce goals.