The Walmart.com redesign

Walmart.com had to do something Amazon couldn't: feel local. Amazon was a sprawling digital warehouse. Walmart's edge was 4,700 physical stores, each with its own neighborhood, its own inventory rhythms, its own familiar greeters. The brief was to translate that into a website that read warm and personal instead of generic. Concepts had to hold up across the Home, Fashion and Re-Order surfaces and survive a head-to-head against the most-used e-commerce site on the planet.

Across an intensive 2017 contract I iterated concepts for three specialty experiences inside the redesigned Walmart.com: a Home destination led by lifestyle imagery and seasonal stories, a Fashion destination that would later anchor the Lord & Taylor flagship, and a Re-Order surface that turned a customer's most-bought items into a one-tap restock. I balanced algorithmic recommendations against human-curated editorial (the anti-Amazon principle) and built components back into the design system, so the patterns I shipped could compose with the trending-locally and pickup-in-store modules the platform team owned.

The redesigned Walmart.com launched in May 2018, six months after the contract wrapped, with the specialty destinations I had helped concept live on day one. Walmart's online sales had already grown 50% in the year leading up to launch. The new site framed itself the way Walmart's eCommerce SVP Jordan Sweetnam put it: ‘not a national e-commerce retailer, but actually an extension of your local Walmart.’ Walmart.com's revenue lifted a reported 40% the following year. Today the same 4,700-store leverage that the redesign was built around runs underneath every Walmart digital property.