Mobile App Design

iOS & Android

Context

Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse was one of the last retailers of its size into app shopping. By the time we started, customers had already learned what a retail app should do from everyone else, which set the bar before we drew a single screen.

I led the UI design and the UX scenarios across the whole product: sign-up and sign-in, browsing, rewards, and the store locator, plus the internal style guide that kept the launch marketing consistent. Seven months from start to launch, on iOS and Android.

Problem

Shopping from anywhere was the obvious reason to build an app, and it was not the interesting one. The real problem was the rewards program. People were enrolled in it without ever really understanding it. Points lived on a receipt or in an email, disconnected from the moment anyone might act on them, so a program meant to bring people back mostly went unnoticed.

The mobile web had the second problem. Headers and footers were carrying navigation built for a desktop screen, and on a phone that furniture took up more room than the products did.

Approach

Put the product first

I cut the headers and footers back to what a phone actually needs. Navigation became a horizontal slider that keeps the most visited pages in view and moves the rest off screen instead of stacking them. Sticky icons along the bottom hold the main routes through the app in reach of a thumb. What that buys is space, and the space went to the product.

Make signing up worth it

Rewards only work if an account is easy to get into, so sign-up and sign-in were designed as one short step rather than a gate. Getting people through it is what makes the rewards screen mean anything.

Stay recognizably Off Broadway

The palette was already approved and years old. A first app is the wrong place to relitigate a brand, so I kept it classic and did not stray far.

• Primary #ED1B2E
• Secondary #000000
• Tertiary #EEEEEE
• Base #FFFFFF

Solution

The app shipped with shopping, rewards, and a store finder that carries real detail about each location rather than just a pin on a map. Rewards finally sit somewhere a customer looks, which was the point of building it.

An app nobody downloads is a design exercise, so the work did not stop at the product. I built an internal style guide so every marketing partner was pulling from the same set of pieces, and designed the launch assets against it: landing pages, email calls-to-action, in-store signage, app store imagery, and promotional video.

Impact

The app also opened a channel the business did not have before. In-app-only promotions perform well, in-store events and promotions reach people through it, and the store finder ties the two sides of the business together. That was always the longer game: connect digital retail to the stores rather than treat them as separate businesses.

What I took from it

• Being last to a category is not only a disadvantage. Everyone else had already taught our customers how a retail app works, and we got to design against a settled set of expectations instead of guessing at them.
• The feature that justifies an app is rarely the obvious one. Shopping got us approval. Rewards is what made the app worth opening twice.
• Shipping the product is half the job. Without the style guide and the launch assets, the app would have been the best-kept secret in the company.

As of 2024, Off Broadway Shoes and its parent company, Rack Room Shoes, have merged.