Walking the Store to improve your product

Credit: Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe. She also talks about essential journeymaps.

Frequency: Quarterly

Goal: Experience key workflows how your customers do, identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement in your digital product.

"Walking the Store" is a practice borrowed from visual merchandising and brick-and-mortar retailers. In the digital world, it means systematically going through your product's key user journeys to assess the user experience, functionality, and overall product quality.

Preparing to Walk the Store

  1. Identify Essential Journeys: Determine your product's 3-5 most critical user journeys.
  2. Create Essential Journeymaps: Develop simplified maps for each journey.
  3. Assign Owners: Each journey should have a designated owner responsible for its quality.
  4. Conduct the Walk: Regularly go through each journey, experiencing it as a user would.
  5. Log Issues: Document any problems, inconsistencies, or areas for improvement.
  6. Prioritize and Fix: Address the identified issues, prioritizing based on impact and effort.

The walk

When walking the store:

  1. Go through the entire journey as a user would.
  2. Try variations: returning user, mobile device, different payment methods.
  3. Attempt common error scenarios: invalid discount code, expired credit card.
  4. Note any confusing language, unclear instructions, or visual inconsistencies.
  5. Check that all success metrics can be properly tracked.
  6. Log any issues or improvements to a UX Debt board.