Wal-Mart hires a TV star to craft the creative side and user experience of Walmart.com
By Elizabeth Gardner
Career-changing phone calls come when you least expect them—like the call Debbie Kristofferson got from e-retailer Walmart.com when she was at the park with the kids.
It was 1999, the height of the dot-com frenzy, and Kristofferson had taken some time off to be with her two young children after a stint at Excite, an early competitor of Yahoo. Her online odyssey began in the early 1990s, when she worked as a producer at The Discovery Channel.
Her science show, Next Step, had given her a chance to do TV segments describing the intriguing development of the Internet. She soon found herself providing supplementary material on the show’s topics for Discovery’s
web site, a pioneer in the art of using Internet content to enhance traditional media. The web ensnared her.
After The Discovery Channel, Kristofferson worked for two years as executive producer at Third Age, a web portal for people heading into retirement. She then moved to Excite, where CEO George Bell, another alum of television, hired her to structure the site into a coherent network of services to engender user loyalty.
Learning curve
“It was a pretty interesting and intense period,” she says. “There was a huge learning curve, and we were trying to maintain a business in a landscape that included Yahoo, MSN and AOL—and Google coming up.” She handled two pregnancies and a horrendous Bay Area commute while there, and she was ready to take it easy for a bit.
But during that fateful park visit, the first one she’d had a chance to take since starting her break, one of her former Excite employees called from Walmart.com in Brisbane, Calif. They needed an executive producer. Was Debbie interested?
Most people wouldn’t say no to Wal-Mart without at least chatting. During their chat, Kristofferson “fell in love” with the team and the opportunity. She’s been there since 2000, and was promoted to vice president of creative and user experience in 2006.
She manages 75 people, including producers, information architects, interface designers, writers and photographers. She also oversees development for Walmart.com’s catalog and services, including the online photo center, digital download service, gift registry, search, cart and checkout. She’s responsible for everything about the look and feel of the site: what goes on the tabs, what’s in each navigation bar, how the product descriptions are set up, how and where rich media is used, which merchandise categories have customer reviews—basically everything that determines whether a customer shops happily at Walmart.com or abandons his cart to visit Target.com or BestBuy.com or any of a host of other hot retail sites.
It’s been quite a roller-coaster. “I wasn’t there for the ‘let’s build it’ period, but there were plenty of start-up phases where we were optimizing our business model and learning how to support it effectively and integrate with the Wal-Mart stores and get our hands around what the customer needs,” she says.
From Walmart.com’s point of view, Kristofferson has done a great job of figuring things out. “Debbie’s unique talent and expertise in user interface consistently generates meaningful experiences for our online customers, and simultaneously drives successful brand and sales-impacting activities for our online business,” says Cathy Halligan, Walmart.com’s chief marketing officer. “Her ability to lead a thriving creative team produces a material impact on the Wal-Mart brand, and significantly contributes to Walmart.com’s consistent sales growth.” Halligan says that Walmart.com’s sales are growing at two to three times the industry average.
Kristofferson’s lack of retail experience set her apart, but not in a negative way, she says. As an enthusiastic shopper, she brought a consumer’s point of view to her analysis, and the site’s merchandising mission sank in quickly once she was at her new post. “How lucky am I to have a ringside seat to learn about merchandising and retail from Wal-Mart?” she asks rhetorically.
Creative chops
A brand-new incarnation of Walmart.com that debuted in October 2006 was Kristofferson’s biggest opportunity yet to demonstrate her creative chops. She oversaw the redesign of 2 million pages, and every aspect of the site was rethought. Browse-to-checkout was stripped down to four clicks, images became larger and enhanced with rich media features, apparel and home furnishings were arranged into “collections” in a way that’s difficult to duplicate at a Wal-Mart store, and customers have new information resources, including CNET product buying guides and customer reviews.
Developing content for a retail site is philosophically different from producing a television show, or even a content-oriented site, where the content and its creators are the stars of the show. In retail, the merchandise and the merchandising team are the stars, and the web team’s function is to support them any way it can. Nonetheless, her TV experience is invaluable, Kristofferson says. “If you can’t grab and maintain someone’s attention, you can’t get ratings and you’re out of business. Having content brought to life in a way that meets viewer needs is a muscle that TV builds over and over again.”
Moreover, the creative types under her supervision remind her strongly of her TV days. “I like overseeing interesting people who bring interesting skill sets to the table,” she says. The redesign brought her a new appreciation of how each person contributes to the whole—not just those on her own team, but throughout the company. “If I’m managing the user experience team, we’re accountable for the success of the launch,” she says. “But there are things outside of my domain that need to be done, too, and it was important for me to understand that critical path. I came out of it with more appreciation for the full orchestra.”
The redesign had several objectives: to make the customer’s experience cleaner and easier, to tell more compelling stories about each item, and to strengthen the brand tie-in between Walmart.com and Wal-Mart stores. “We were being more thoughtful about the role of each level of page, whether it was the home page, a department or a product page,” Kristofferson says. “Then we edited out the things that didn’t add the value they should.”
The customers themselves were the cornerstone of the redesign, and they were quizzed thoroughly, right down to eye-tracking studies. Kristofferson’s team combined the customer research findings with data from Omniture Inc., its web analytics service, and found it was frequently spending too much time on the wrong things.
For example, the old site had a three-column structure. Site navigation was on the left, while the middle area featured product details and the right-hand column was used to promote seasonal merchandise or other products that might interest the customer.
“We learned that customers were ignoring that part of the page, so the click-through was low, and it got no attention in eye-tracking studies,” Kristofferson says. Those studies showed the considerable effort Kristofferson’s team put into creating content for the right-hand column was largely wasted. The new, two-column site has only the left-hand section for site navigation and the main section; tabs for site navigation are included across the top. The right-hand column has been abandoned for now, but may be readopted someday if the design team can find a way to use it to serve the customer.
Two many tabs
And about those tabs: a growing number of departments had led to two rows of tabs at the old site, which confused the customers. For the redesign, the team asked its customer guinea pigs to go over the site’s entire catalog and pick the most natural category for each item. The process helped whittle the tabs down to one row, with pull-down menus for subcategories. “The question of what gets a tab has been the subject of thousands of meetings at Internet companies around the world,” Kristofferson says. “It may seem a little silly, but it’s an important conversation to have.”
Internal studies showed that 90% of Walmart.com’s customers have broadband Internet access, making it feasible to use rich media. Customers can see multiple views of many items, as well as different colors. Some items have a quick-view, so customers can view details without leaving their results page. Though Walmart.com’s annual sales are in ten figures ($1.26 billion in 2006, according to Internet Retailer estimates) they’re a minor part of the merchant’s overall revenue of almost $350 billion in 2006. Nonetheless, the site provides crucial support for thousands of retail stores, and the linkage has become even tighter with the redesign. Kristofferson says 90% of Walmart.com’s users go to a Wal-Mart store at least once a month, and half of them visit weekly. They use the web site to do comparisons and read reviews, though they often make the actual purchase in the store.
To serve those crossover customers, and increase their numbers, the redesign incorporated several new features. Site-to-store shipping lets customers send items to their local Wal-Mart store for pick-up—a boon for both the customer, who gets free shipping, and the store, which almost always rings up extra sales when the customer comes to pick up the goods, the retailer has found. The “Site To Store” logo is prominent not only on the web site, but also in stores, so customers know exactly where they need to go to get their merchandise.
Minivan mileage
“There’s all kinds of need for this service,” Kristofferson says. For example, parents sending their children to college can purchase all the necessary accoutrements at Walmart.com and have them shipped to the child’s college town, saving wear and tear on the minivan.
For those who can’t wait the seven to 10 business days for site-to-store and want to buy something that’s also stocked at the stores, Walmart.com is now testing a “Find in Store” feature, which checks inventories at every store within 100 miles of the customer’s ZIP code.
While Walmart.com isn’t releasing numbers on how the new site is performing, Kristofferson says feedback from customers shows their perception of the brand has changed for the better. “The merchandise hasn’t changed,” she says, “but we’re presenting it in a way that highlights the quality and value.”
Her advice is to focus on customers’ needs, and make them drive the decisions. “Do something crude and quick, if you have to, and put it in front of people and see what they think,” she says. “You may find your assumptions are just wrong. But you also have to trust your gut and keep moving. The best case is to have data from customers to guide you, but not to get mired in it.”
Elizabeth Gardner is a Riverside, Ill.-based freelance business writer.
