Digital customer experience download with Elisabeth Mancini

Elisabeth Mancini is UX manager at The Very Group

I’ve spent more than 20 years specialising in human-centred design. Perhaps you’re not familiar with the term? Put simply, it’s an approach to design problem-solving that centres on building empathy to understand needs, and solutions that satisfy those needs.

At Very, what we’re designing is the digital customer experience across our website and app. Improving user experience is at the forefront of every decision.

That’s where our UX (user experience) team comes in…

We’re customer champions and natural problem solvers. Our UX researchers and designers are embedded into cross-functional squads (teams), working on defined product outcomes (goals), to help bring Very’s wider strategic vision to life.

Despite working across multiple squads, we have a great team spirit. We nurture our sense of togetherness in lots of ways, like weekly design review and critique sessions. Through close working relationships, we make sure nothing is released to customers without evidence and insight.

And, thanks to Very’s hybrid working model, we make the working week work for us. Time in our stylish, contemporary office is for being collaborative and time at home is for being productive. And because we’re digital-first, home can be anywhere.

Let me tell you a bit more about how we work, and what we’re working on.

Presentation is everything

We’re transforming our ecommerce platform through a new partnership with commercetools. That includes implementing a new design system, Fuse, on the presentation layer (front part) of our website and app. This will create a more contemporary, intuitive experience and visual consistency across the whole customer journey.

Very's new design system

Accessibility for all  

We want Very’s website and app to be usable by everyone. That means ensuring people with accessibility needs can understand, navigate and interact with our pages, in accordance with international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.  

Our new partnership with Fable, which helps businesses engage people with disabilities in research and user testing, is a big step forward. We can conduct usability tests with participants with disabilities and accessibility requirements. Their feedback will give us actionable insight on modifying our UX design to make it more inclusive. First up, we’ll be working with Fable to test our product pages.  

It's a sprint not a marathon 

As a UX team, we lead business-wide collaboration to solve customer pain points through design sprints and discovery workshops. Design sprints are a thinking method used to solve complex problems through co-creation, rapid prototyping, and qualitative testing. They help us find solutions in a very compressed timeframe. By bringing the right experts together, we’ve improved our returns and refund process and optimised the digital journey for new Very Pay customers, to give just two recent examples.  

That’s (not) all, folks 

In the last few months, we’ve also navigated a complex project to streamline customer experience during our identification and verification process, collaborating with numerous other teams. We visited Skygate, our fulfilment centre, for a deep-dive session on returns and refunds as learning more about important operational processes helps us design an even better user experience. And we carried out customer research into the large item delivery experience when shopping with Very and our competitors, to make sure ours is the best it can be. 

Do we sound like a team you’d like to be part of? We’re hiring for technology roles, including UX. Head to our careers page to find out more.