1. Overview

  2. Problem

  3. Role & Team

  4. Process and Decisions

  5. impact

  6. Reflection

 

 

  1. Overview: Macy’s Parade NFT Showcase & Voting Experience

  • Product: A Mobile optimized website for collectors of featured NFT projects & guests to vote on their favorite collection

  • Role: Specialist, Design Research & Product Management

  • Impact: Built an interactive 3D browser-based world and digital art gallery to showcase NFT artwork on both mobile and desktop with 5,000 concurrent sessions, setting a record for the Oncyber platform

 

2. Problem

  • As Macy’s entered its second year of R&D in NFT’s, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency, we wanted to follow up with an activation draw in both net-new and lapsed niche customer segments while boosting our own internal capabilities in Blockchain Technology.

  • Our previous years collectors were eager to see what Macy’s had planned, so we needed a high-quality activation to out do 2021’s simple generative art collection.

  • We needed a creative approach to continue on with our Thanksgiving charitable partner, the Make-A-Wish foundation after raising $250,000 with NFTs the previous year.

  • Regulatory uncertainty regarding NFTs and compliance with Know-Your-Customer, Anti-Money Laundering & Counter Financing of Terrorism laws.

  • Concerns about the “video-game” appearance of the activation potentially appealing to children and ensuring the correct speed bumps/guardrails and legal disclaimers were in place.

 

3. Role & Team

  • Specialist, design research: strong advocate for user centered design, lead by action with competitive/comparative analysis & low to medium fidelity wireframes and prototypes.

  • Collaborated with:

  • 3-5 engineers (front & back end)

  • 2 VPs (marketing and treasury)

  • 3 creative directors

  • 2 UX designers

  • 2 internal legal counsel

  • 1 external legal counsel

  • 3 risk management

  • 4 enterprise security

  • 6 marketing finance

  • 1 copy

  • 2 marketing creative

  • 4-5 external vendors

  • Leadership angle: Lead Researcher on all things Blockchain responsible for digesting and socializing key learnings to broader team.

  • Built multi-signature digital wallet infrastructure in partnership with finance and treasury to create trust-less safeguards to blockchain assets.

  • Took initiative to find vendor partners, define Statements of Work, facilitate contracting, Risk Assessments, and Security Architecture Reviews for external SaaS integrations with Macy’s systems.

  • Set meetings and agendas with cross functional partners to drive product to market.

  • When developers struggled to Deploy an NFT airdrop script, I read the developer docs myself, created a local node.js environment and successfully distributed 10,000 NFTs to verified wallet addresses.

4. Process & Decisions

Research:

  • This project touched several net-new elements for our Macy’s, such as immersive, interactive 3D and Blockchain. Research began largely ambiguous, diverging and converging organically.

  • Competitive/comparative analysis on blockchain protocols (white papers), and brands.

  • Rapid usability testing with internal teams.

  • “early access” voting period with select NFT collection owners recruited via discord community.

UX improvements:

  • Created user journey maps and user flows for voting website and 3D experience.

  • Promoted highlighting the Blockchain network currently selected, as featured collections existed across Ethereum & Polygon blockchains, not every user was aware during agency launch of MVP.

Visual / UI enhancement:

  • Highlighted need for feed-forward UX micro-copy in smart-contract wallet-transactions and across the user journey.

  • Met weekly for design critique and review with agency/vendor partners ensuring compliance with style guide.

Collaboration:

  • Ideated overall virtual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade concept with leadership and vendor partners.

  • Partnered and contributed in UX design with agency and internal creative.

  • Partnered with Legal on redlining contracts with vendors.

  • Co-moderated discord channel throughout project lifecycle in partnership with PR colleagues and social moderation team.

  • Re-minted Original Parade NFT collection for feature in digital gallery space.

  • Decorated and Tested virtual gallery space interactions and mechanics.

5. Impact

  • Created Macy’s first ever crypto wallers to enable brand ownership of web3 & blockchain activity.

  • 10,000+ votes casted from NFT holders and general site visitors alike.

  • 1,000’s of concurrent Oncyber users at a time with a record high of 5,000 concurrent users, a first for the Oncyber platform. Each instance held a max of 150 users resulting in 10-40+ concurrent instances of the Virtual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

  • Brought 5 curated virtual art galleries into a digital Macy’s Herald Square.

6. Reflection

This project marked the first live launch of my deep dive into blockchain work at Macy’s and was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever had the privilege of working on. It required adaptability, humility, patience and a dedication to both learning and teaching. We dove into new and complex concepts that most of our colleagues and stakeholders had no working knowledge of in this nascent space.