eCommerce at Advance Auto Parts was still a nascent initiative when I first joined. So a lot of the infrastructure for user-centered design had to be built from the ground up.

I began by working with stakeholders to create a culture of curiosity. One that went beyond anecdotes and dived deep for analytics, replays, and customer feedback.

I aligned myself with an existing market research team and set out to learn the trends and behaviors of our customers.

Being a designer that focuses on delivering around feasibility, I recognized our technical constraints early on. I worked with the Product Owner and Enterprise Architects to clearly define our feature set.

I took stakeholders through design sprints to bring alignment around priorities and opportunities. I also worked with a Business Analyst to ensure that we met legal requirements and business rules.

After launch, I took a leadership role in planning new features and making inclusivity a first-class citizen in our product roadmap.

Research and usability testing played a key role in guiding the decisions and efforts of the team in delivering the mobile app.

We built an in-house usability lab to test the app at every critical junction with real Advance Auto Parts customers.

We used prototypes, test builds, surveys, and interviews to validate that we were building something customers would love.

I took the opportunity to define Advance's new UI direction and tackled ideation at the component and element level.

I worked with distributed engineers to create a component library that could be used to quickly build views. This also allowed us to quickly validate and debug UIs.

I tested variants with customers and distilled design-related feedback for iterations. The component library grew into a Design System that now supports Native and Web.