The Problem:
On Black Friday in 2018, an unintended discount stack went viral on slickdeals.net. This deal was on the Ring camera, which Home Depot was (unintetionally) selling for buy one get one free, at half price. Thousands of orders were placed overnight, which led to the loss of thousands of dollars in revenue.
The Solution:
My team and I created an application to automatically scrape slickdeals.net, and alert Merchants if a deal was above a certain threshold of validity.
How I did it:
Research, design, research again
This was my very first experience at a company the size of Home Depot. I had no idea what a Merchant was, what "scraping" was, or any of these super niche terms that everyone was throwing around. I had to conduct a ton of research in order to even start to figure out who to talk to. I was able to conduct interviews with Merchants, Merchant Planners, and even an offshore team who would check the alerts from the application we were building. I completed the following research methods in order to determine a solution:
Discovery research interviews
Design studios
Usability testing
Images have been omitted or blurred due to proprietary information NDA
The Personas
Through the research I conducted, I learned that Home Depot had an offshore team that would manually check slickdeals.net every half hour, 24 hours a day. This was an extremely tedious process, and required around-the-clock monitoring.
The Design Solution:
I designed the website using prototyping software Axure. After conducting research and usability tests, I found that including an at-a-glance section at the top with a table that filters in deals scraped from slickdeals.net was the most effective.
The Value
The application my team and I built will result in a time savings of 44 minutes per hour for the team manually monitoring slickdeals.net, as well as $163,000 annual labor savings. Also, it will result in no more unintended deals, which, in this particular case, was upwards of millions of dollars.
