Professional/Case Studies/Case Study 04
Professional · Case Study 04
Consumer Product Craft · Lowe's
A verification flow that made loyal customers give up partway through. The fix wasn't a new interface — it was one reordered step that protected revenue, lifted conversion, and turned a discount into a loyalty event.
57%
Faster task completion
91%
Verified completion rate
19pt
Drop-off reduction
4.7/5
User satisfaction
Organization
Lowe's Companies, Inc.
Fortune 50 Retail
Role
Senior UX Manager
Product UX & delivery
Team
1 designer · 1 researcher
1 content designer
Timeline
2 sprints
Discovery → launch
The Business Problem
Lowe's military discount program serves one of the company's most loyal, high-value customer segments. To claim the discount, military members had to verify eligibility through a third-party identity provider before a Lowe's account was ever created.
That one sequencing decision cost the company on three fronts at once: verification spend on people who never converted, loyalty enrollment delayed for a premium segment, and an experience out of step with modern standards.
This was not a design problem. It was a business-architecture problem with a design symptom.
No Intake
No defined problem statement, segment, or objective
No Framework
No phased process from discovery to validation
No Metrics
No defined criteria for what success looked like
The Diagnosis
The ask that reached the design team was scoped as a UI modernization. That framing missed the actual problem. Without intervention, this would have shipped as a surface-level refresh — faster to execute, and far less valuable.
The Intervention
I established the operating structure first. Each phase had defined entry criteria, artifact outputs, and a handoff condition. No work entered development until it passed validation — and the framework became the team's repeatable standard going forward.
Discovery produced personas, journey maps, and requirements. User testing validated with real military-affiliated participants before anything reached engineering. Every phase produced evidence; every handoff was earned.
The Result
Completion rate
72%
91%
Average completion time
6m 45s
3m 10s
Drop-off rate
28%
9%
User satisfaction (1–5)
3.2
4.7
Source: user validation with military-affiliated participants · old flow vs. new flow
Retention
A discount transaction became a loyalty acquisition event — members enroll earlier, before verification completes.
Conversion
Completion up 19 points; drop-off cut from 28% to 9% by removing the primary abandonment point.
Cost
Unqualified verification spend eliminated — Lowe's stopped paying for users who would never onboard.
Leadership in Action
UX entered at the strategic layer before the business case was finalized. The loyalty opportunity was surfaced before a single screen existed.
The seven-phase framework was introduced, applied, and institutionalized — governance was the mechanism that converted a tactical request into a measurable outcome.
The redesigned flow was validated with real users and landed a 4.7/5 satisfaction score. The outcome took both structural governance and screen-level product judgment.
The lesson I reuse everywhere: treat compliance as a design partner, not a constraint to fight. The wall was never the requirement. It was the order we asked for it in.