American Eagle Customer Journey Map

Mapping a Customer Journey

About the Project

Project Challenge

The User Experience Research team at American Eagle embarked on an ambitious project: to map our customer’s journey from beginning to end; from what influences and triggers their desire to shop, all the way through to when they dispose of the clothing item.  Previous to this project, American Eagle did not have a robust and detailed understanding of the customer’s journey when shopping for clothes. We were missing this larger context when designing digital or in-store experiences. We also wanted to identity what we call Key Moments of Truth, the moments in the journey that matter most to the customer and create lasting product and brand loyalty. 

My Role

With this project, I was one of the lead researchers as well as the visual designer of all final deliverables. My responsibilities within this project included:

• Creating interview guides and research protocols for all research methods

• Conducting participant interviews in homes

• Conducting ethnographic customer shop-alongs in store

• Affinitizing and analyzing research insights

• Designing and writing content for the final design of the Customer Journey Map

• Crafting the presentation around the journey map to share our customer’s compelling story with stakeholders and executives

Results

The Customer Journey Map has been extremely well received by the company. I have presented the map and its story to stakeholders across the company including the CEO, board of directors, and every member of the executive leadership team. There has been such an internal demand to learn about this project that I have given the presentation over 50 times to various groups across the organization.

The Customer Journey Map and its focus on the customer’s experience started a shift towards a more customer centric way of thinking within the organization. The Customer Journey Map is being used as a strategic lever to help define and refine AEO’s strategic framework for years to come, guiding strategic and tactical roadmaps for designing and deploying new experiences across the company. For example, the Digital team has reorganized their product groups to match to the steps and moments of truth outlined in the journey map.

As a result of this groundbreaking research, I was named the Top Employee of the Quarter for Q4 2018 and was named runner-up for 2018 “Eagle of the Year”, the top employee award across all of American Eagle.

Research Process and Approach

Research Methods

Because the goal of this project was understanding the “why” behind our customers’ motivations and goals, we used a mixed, methods qualitative research approach to see the journey from our customer’s perspective and gather deep insights into the reasons behind their behavior.

Our qualitative research methods included:

• In store ethnographic shop-alongs

• In home interviews

• Contextual inquiry around online shopping

• Remote customer journaling using the tool dScout

• Remote usability testing of online shopping activities

Through the interviews, shop-alongs and remote customer journaling we were able to talk to 60 customers within American Eagle’s target demographic.

We also analyzed quantitative data to validate the findings from the customer interviews. Our quantitative research methods included:

• Textual analysis of over 1,000 feedback comments from customers

• Analysis of digital metrics and analytics data

• Analysis of purchase data in store and online

Research Analysis and Affinitizing

We videotaped all of our interviews and research activities. After each interview was complete, we reviewed the footage and took detailed notes on all the salient points and quotes. We grouped these pieces of data into high-level categories using Trello and post-its notes to see the trends and common themes that came out of our interviews.

Building the Journey Map

Using the key themes we heard customers talking about as a starting point, we began to put the themes into a general order, teasing out the steps of the journey from what customers said during our research. The journey then began to take shape and we were able to create a general structure and framework from those insights.

We also identified the moments that matter most to customers, what we call moments of truth, based on which moments had the most emotional intent and importance for customers in their journey. We mapped the customers emotion at each point in the journey, marking where their expectations differed from their actual experience.

After all of the research analysis was done, it was my role on the project to design the final visualization of the customer journey. I approached this challenge as any other design challenge; I sketched out ideas for how we could lay out the design. I spoke to stakeholders to determine what information the journey map should include to help them in their roles at AE. There were several rounds of iteration before landing on the final layout and design.

The Final Design

The final design of the journey map is a detailed and expansive view of our customer’s journey from inspiration to disposal, showing how the customer moves through and between the various channels and stages of the journey.

The journey map shows the steps the customer takes at each stage of the journey as well as a line graph showing their emotions at each step in that journey. At the bottom of each step, I included a “How might we” question with each step, to act as a thought starter of how we might as an organization start to tackle the pain points or opportunities we found in our research.

Journey Map Socialization

Putting Research Into Action

I also created the presentation around the customer journey map, including selecting which videos to show from our research to illustrate the key points of the journey in our customer’s own words. This presentation allowed us to socialize the journey map across the organization and showcase how we can focus on customer experience. The presentation brought our customer’s journey to life in such a compelling way that I have given it over 50 times to various teams across American Eagle

I have facilitated many workshops with teams in different parts of the organization to brainstorm how we can address the “How Might We” thought starters, opportunities, and pain points uncovered during our research. These workshops helped those teams generate ideas and priorities for their roadmaps for the coming quarters.

The Customer Journey Map is being used as a strategic lever to help define and refine AEO’s strategic framework for years to come, guiding strategic and tactical roadmaps for designing and deploying new experiences across the company.

Building a Journey Atlas

Since the initial project to map the general customer journey, I have led the UX research team in creating customer journey maps for holiday gift shopping and specifically the swim shopping experience, using the same far reaching, mixed methods research approach to understand our customer’s emotions across their journey.

If you would like more details on the AE customer journey or our process, please drop me a note!