Streamline

Burberry's product development and launch process relied on a combination of off-the-shelf products and offline documents, which proved to be a significant pain point for product developers who preferred to focus on creating high-quality luxury products instead of dealing with an admin-heavy and complex system. As the design lead, my task was to understand the product lifecycle, observe the current system in use, and identify the blockers and challenges. Using questionnaires and workshops, I then devised a plan for a more efficient and streamlined way of working.

To test these ideas, I created initial prototypes and flows that included multi-device input, enabling product developers to capture a photo of a sketch or garment with their phone, annotate notes and sketch adjustments directly on the image, and add it directly to a product record. The final step was to develop production-ready user interfaces across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices, with customizations to the user journeys for each device based on the team's preferred context of use. While maintaining Burberry's digital style and visual language, we also pushed the design language further to accommodate new types of back-office and input-focused componentry.

By consolidating all their disparate workflows and tools into a single, responsive, and streamlined tool, we were able to give time and focus back to the product developers, ultimately solving their biggest problem. The new application was well-received by both product developers and managers, as it allowed them to keep better track of the garment flow through the production cycle and better manage prototype and sampling costs. The project has since progressed into a second phase, focusing on supporting the raw material development process, thereby bringing the entirety of Burberry's material and product development into a single, connected source.