Selfridges
Lead developer at Selfridges within the Customer Experience team, focusing on advanced feature development and optimisation for this premier UK department store.
In Detail
After a brief hiatus from working in e‑commerce, June 2020 found me joining Selfridges in a capacity familiar to my time at John Lewis. It will come as no surprise that during the first Covid‑19 lockdown, Selfridges had seen an enormous spike in its website traffic and demand for online services. I joined their Customer Experience team as a lead developer to offer consultation and expertise in making the most of this huge increase in demand.
Their website sat on a disparate set of codebases: the relics of three previous and partial attempts to modernise the platform, each still powering a significant portion of the website. This led to notable inconsistencies in the user experience whilst using the site, where even things as fundamental as the width of the page would change from one screen to the next.
On top of this poor user experience, the splintered codebase also meant that, in most cases, where a development change was required, the work would have to be carried out in three separate places, using three different technology stacks.
Rather than build yet another fourth shard into the application, we chose to embrace the most recent React attempt. Our first experiment was to embed a new React component into all three sections of the site. With this experiment deemed a success, we were then able to progressively enhance the entire platform by developing and introducing common components.
This also allowed us to renovate and improve sections of the site that customers found most problematic. Notably, we overhauled the Product Listing and Product Details user journey, introducing new filtering options and a quick‑filter system to let visitors select the most commonly used combinations of filters.
With these improvements, conversion rates increased unprecedentedly over the following month, just in time for the country to go into the second lockdown...
Product Listing Page
A significant overhaul of the Product Listing Pages removed difficulties that visitors had been experiencing in finding their specific product, a very common problem that I had come across before. This introduced a new filtering system alongside a new quick‑filtering technique that allows multiple common filters to be added and removed quickly.
Product Details Page
The PDP had historically performed poorly with visitors who arrived directly on mobile and touch‑screen devices. With the 2020 Covid‑19 lockdowns in the UK came a massive and sudden rise in visitors to the website, particularly on mobile devices. The PDP was overhauled to improve interactions and visibility for those users, increasing conversion by over 65% in a month.
Brand Directory
A development piece I took on personally, the Brand Directory had historically been rarely visited by anybody, little more than an alphabetised list of links. This rebuild introduced a new design, more accessible on‑page navigation, and a vastly refined mobile experience, which has transformed this unloved page into a genuinely useful tool for website users.
