Michelle Hardi✦
All workCase study

Officeworks home screen

A personalised, goal-oriented home screen for an audience that arrives knowing exactly what they came to buy.

Role
Senior Product Designer
Company
Officeworks
Year
2019
Squad
Mobile apps team

Officeworks is one of Australia's leading office-supplies and stationery retailers. As part of their product roadmap, they wanted to introduce a personalised home screen to better serve their customers.

The existing app hadn't been updated in a while and lagged behind other major retail apps in both functionality and experience. Analytics told a clear story: users were highly goal-oriented — they arrived knowing exactly what they needed and were ready to buy. That insight shaped everything that followed.

The previous Officeworks app home screen — a plain ‘browse by category’ list.
Before: a category list that asked people to dig 5–6 levels deep to find a product.

Discovery

I explored popular retail and travel apps, pulling out how they handled personalised and seasonal content. Sharing those patterns with stakeholders helped secure buy-in for the work.

Competitor analysis comparing home screens across retail and travel apps.
Competitor analysis across retail and travel apps.

I ran baseline usability testing with 5 users through Askable — there were no prior studies to build on. The landing screen made people navigate 5–6 subcategory levels just to find a product, with no curated sections to browse and no intuitive starting point.

Armed with gift cards as incentives, I also visited a store to gather feedback on the landing screen in person — it was genuinely insightful to talk to such a range of customers where they actually shop.

~20sspent on the landing screen
23%of 3,000 visits went straight to search
5users in baseline testing
User feedback slide: the app felt formal, bland and dated; people wanted inspiration and personalisation.
The language felt formal, the design felt dated — people wanted inspiration, not a directory.

Ideation workshop

I organised and facilitated a home-screen ideation workshop with 22 participants. I lined up stakeholders, arranged lightning talks and made sure the speakers were prepped.

We opened with a warm-up and a Crazy 8s exercise, then paired people up to develop one design they believed in, and shared them back as a group. Over 2.5 hours the room generated a huge amount of material — which I then synthesised into the vision piece.

Photos from the ideation workshop — participants sketching and presenting Crazy 8s ideas.

Design

The research and the workshop ideas informed the direction: a home screen that opens with the things a goal-driven shopper actually wants — quick actions, personalised blocks and seasonal, inspiring content — instead of a category index.

Design exploration of the new personalised home screen, with modular content blocks.
Exploring a modular, personalised layout.
The personalised Officeworks home screen in motion — a greeting, quick actions and curated sections.
After: a personalised home that greets you, surfaces quick actions and curates what's next.

Reflection

I built the vision for this home screen and brought the business with me — the research, a 22-person ideation workshop I ran end to end, and a direction stakeholders bought into. My contract wrapped before the final build, but Officeworks went on to ship a home screen that closely follows that vision. It's the version customers use today, and the line back to the work I led is clear.