Dickies: Uniform Builder

As part of the responsive redesign and re-platform of Dickies.com on Demandware, some elements needed to be completely rethought. One such component was their Uniform Builder tool, which needed to work across a range of screen sizes and be able to leverage as much native Demandware functionality as possible in order to keep production costs down.

At the start of the redesign effort, I conducted baseline user testing of the existing Uniform Builder experience to assess its strengths and weakness with actual Dickies customers. One of the most interesting discoveries to come from this research was that, due to the large number of uniforms available, men frequently asked for a way to narrow down the options by profession and performance characteristics, such as flame resistance and waterproofing. For women and children, on the other hand, these features were less important due to the smaller number of uniforms available. Since the experience would be driven through the Men, Women, and Kids categories, the merchant needed the flexibility to enable and disable filters such as these from within the administration panel of Demandware. You'll see this decision reflected in notes on page one of the document below.

With more than 40% of traffic to the site coming from smartphones and tablets, I used a "mobile first" design approach. I also found creative ways to repurpose out-of-the-box Demandware templates for category browse and product details so that a custom application did not need to be coded.