Days on the shop floor
Working in the stores rather than visiting them. Watching what customers ask, what staff answer, and where the current system left both of them stuck.
I spent my research days on the shop floor. Most of what was wrong with the website was visible there.
Four years on Decathlon.co.uk. A shop holding dozens of sports and a house of brands, rebuilt on Decathlon's own guidelines, improvised and extended wherever they ran out.
- Sector
- Sports retail, United Kingdom
- Year
- 2015 to 2019
- My role
- Research, UX/UI, brand and campaign art direction
- Scope
- Ecommerce, campaigns, print, community
DECATHLONSearch the range2
New season
Run further
than last week Shop running
than last week Shop running
RunningCyclingHikingFitnessFootball
Kalenji Run Support£24.99
Kiprun KS500£59.99
Domyos Tights£14.99
DECATHLONRunning shoes2
360°
Kiprun KS500
£59.99
★★★★☆ 412 reviews
Size
7891011
In stock at Canada Water · today
Add to basket
Stock in the store nearest you, on the page, before the basket.
DECATHLONCommunity2
Saturday runs, Richmond Park34 going · free · every week
RSRachel S."Second time out. The 5k group is the friendliest."
TMTom M."Borrowed a pair from the store to try before buying."
Join this groupSee all near me
ShopSport first, not category first. People arrive knowing what they do, not what aisle it lives in.
Reconstructed in HTML for this page. Representative layouts, invented products and prices, no client material.
The challenge
Decathlon sells dozens of sports to people who mostly do one. The shop is enormous, the range is enormous, and the website had inherited the warehouse's logic rather than the customer's.
- The sports were there. The brands were not. You could find running. What you could not find was the brand that makes it, with its own space, its own story, its own line-up and its own season. A home for each brand inside the shop, with the flow and the room to be itself.
- The store and the site behaved like separate companies. Stock, advice and returns all worked differently depending on which one you were standing in. Store stock on the product page, before the basket rather than after it.
- A house of brands inside one shop. Each brand carries its own set of sports, its own product line-up and its own calendar, and each sport has a leader running it. A conversation with every one of them before a campaign exists. A working relationship with every sports leader, and artwork produced to a standard all of them could recognise.
- Every campaign looked like a different company. Print, digital and in-store came from different hands with nothing shared to work from. Decathlon's guidelines improvised into something that held across media it was never written for.
The insight
Analytics tells you where somebody stopped. It will not tell you why. Someone picks up two pairs, holds one in each hand, asks a colleague a single question and buys. None of that was available on a product page.
What people wanted was not more information. It was the part of the shop that answers a question, moved onto the screen. And they wanted to know whose it was, because a runner buying running kit is buying into a brand, not a department.
Art direction
One idea, and every surface it had to survive.
A launch is not a poster. It is a newspaper page at broadsheet size, a magazine spread, a homepage, a product page and something two metres tall in a store, all made by different people in different weeks, for a brand with its own story and its own season. The standard is the thing that keeps them one idea.
One idea
THE DAILY
Run further
than last weekDecathlon
than last weekDecathlon
Run further
than last week
than last week
Decathlon
DECATHLON
Run further
than last weekShop running
than last weekShop running
Run
further
than last
week
further
than last
week
Decathlon
NewspaperMono, one line, read at arm's length
MagazineFull bleed, the image carries it
DigitalThe line has to survive a nav and a price
In storeTwo metres tall, read while walking past
Same line, same idea, four sets of physical constraints. Print gives you one look and no scrolling. A homepage gives you three seconds and a competing nav. A store gives you a person walking past at speed. Knowing which part of the idea survives each of those is most of what art direction is.
How the work was done
Digital research
Behaviour on the site read against what the floor had already shown. The two together said something neither said alone.
Working the guidelines
Decathlon had guidelines. They did not reach a broadsheet page, a two metre poster or a brand that needed its own voice inside the shop. I improvised on them and extended them until an agency, a printer and an in-house designer could produce work that looked related without anyone standing over them.
Print, digital, store
Product visualisation
How a product is shown, turned and scaled, so that choosing between two of them online is as quick as picking both up.
Sports leaders
Every sport has someone running it, with a calendar and a line-up of their own. Campaigns and artwork were made with them rather than handed to them.
What came out of it
Four years of it. The shopping experience rebuilt, each brand given a home of its own inside it, and more than forty campaigns art directed to one standard across every medium the business bought.
Conversion moved from 1.8 per cent to 2.7. On a shop this size that is not a rounding change, it is half as many visits again turning into orders. Engagement went up 70 per cent alongside it, which is the part that came from giving each brand somewhere to tell its own story.
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Campaigns art directed across print, digital and store
0
Conversion, from 1.8 per cent to 2.7
0
Increase in user engagement
- Store researchDays worked on the floor, with staff and customers
- Shopping experienceEntry by sport, store stock on the page, flow rebuilt
- One standardDecathlon's guidelines extended to hold across print, digital and store
- Forty plus campaignsArt directed across newspaper, magazine, partner platforms and store
- Product visualisationHow the range is shown, turned and compared
- A home per brandOwn space, story, line-up and calendar inside the shop
Want the longer version?
Happy to walk through the store research, the campaign work and what the guidelines had to settle.