EstéE Lauder - Internal Tooling Redesign

 

Estée Lauder’s internal Promotions Tool supports coupons and promotions for 23 international brands and their websites across the world. Imagine all the problems that could occur with different currencies, error message translations, time zones, and running multiple promos at once. Promo fraud was rampant. The tool was in dire need of some help.

THE Basics

ROLE: Product Designer

THE PROBLEM: The Estée promo tool was losing millions due to promo fraud resulting from employee error. The question was, how can we build a better promo tool, in-house, that is easy to use across multiple brands, currencies, time zones, and languages?

TOOLS: Figma, Jira, Confluence

METHODS: Usability testing, User interviews, Comparative analysis, Focus Groups

TEAMMATES: Manager, Dev Lead, and Product Manager

TIMEFRAME: January - March 2023

CONTEXT: Estée Lauder Companies owns 23 brands worldwide (as of 2024) including Mac, Clinique, and Aveda. I bet you’ve heard of those! The great problem Estée has is that it continues to grow, but with growth comes growing pains. Their internal promotions tool had become a frankenstein system - there was so much functionality, but it was entirely too confusing and employee user error ended up costing Estée Lauder millions.

When I came on board, leadership knew they wanted to redesign their internal promotions tool in-house rather than use a SaaS product, but the timeline, roadmap, and vision were not clear.

 

The Process

Leadership Interviews

It wasn’t clear what was needed, so I took the time to speak with VP’s and understand their must haves.

Must Haves:

  1. Allow both senior level execs and associate marketers to build promos

    1. VPs need to be able to build promos across multiple brands, countries, languages, websites, timezones, and currencies. For example: 10% off for Mac, Bumble & Bumble, and Aveda across all EMEA and LATAM websites.

    2. Marketing coordinators at the individual country and brand also need to be able to build promos. For example: Free Gift with Purchase for Frédéric Malle in France.

  2. Include industry leading features

  3. Include a promo calendar

3 Prong Generative Research Plan

I needed to identify a road map forward to design a top-of-the-line promo tool. This new tool wasn’t going to be built for some time, so I used usability testing not only to understand my users’ mental models better but also to help identify low cost/high impact pain points in the current promo tool that could be fixed immediately to provide a better employee experience. Second, I creating a script to host interviews with employee users from Aveda, Clinique, and Frederic Malle. Third, I compared the top 4 SaaS promo tool products with the current Estée tool to understand what ELC was doing well and what they needed to improve upon.

1. USability Testing

I conducted usability tests on employee users of the promo tool to understand their pain points. I was able to not only identify low cost/high reward Pain Points to fix in the current tool, but also identify what could be kept for the future redesign.

 

2. User Interviews & Focus Groups

While I was holding more informal focus groups, I created an interview script for moderated user interviews, then identified 3 brands and regions from which I could interview 9 employee users.

 

3. Comparative Analysis

I compared Estée’s current promo tool to 4 leading SaaS promo products - Talon.One, Voucherify, Lightspeed Ecommerce, and Shopify. I took an inventory of all the primary features and ran flows for the 3 most common promos employees run - 10% off, free shipping, and free gift with purchase.

 

PresentAtion to leadership

I reguarly kept leadership up-to-date on findings through the process and at the end of three months, presented my final findings and recommendations moving forward.