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125+ research insights
mapped and managed across the Branding Studio journey
20 new components
contributed to the NCR Voyix back office design system
100% task success
on theme creation, send, and archive in usability benchmarking
9 stakeholders interviewed
across 3 retailer organizations
Retailers want their in-store touchpoints to carry their brand, and they want to change them for promotional and loyalty moments on their own timing. Every branding change routed through NCR work streams, which meant lead time, back and forth, and an in-store brand experience that felt vendor-managed rather than retailer-owned.
Branding Studio had been worked on by many people over four to five years. I was the designer who took it to a delivered MVP. Previous iterations and research shaped my process, so this was never a blank page. It was a judgment problem: what to carry forward, what to rebuild, and how to reconcile all of it with the back office design system now being adopted across the company.
Business Goals
Insert here
The direct user is a retailer’s brand or marketing team. The person it is ultimately for is the shopper, who never opens this product but sees everything that comes out of it. That double audience shaped the work throughout. A configuration decision that looks minor in the tool is a decision about what every shopper sees at a lane. Research also surfaced a second persona split that mattered more than expected: the creative-type user who builds a theme is often not the technical user who deploys it, and in most organizations those are different people with different permissions.
I ran three customer interview sessions with 9 stakeholders across ADUSA, Wakefern, and Pilot Flying J, then moderated usability testing through Dscout with 5 participants matched to the marketing-manager persona. I own the Branding Studio journey end to end on the UX team, mapped in TheyDo with our researcher, where all 125+ insights live against the journey rather than in a deck nobody reopens.
Both research streams landed in the same place: customers were not asking for more creative freedom. They were asking for confidence, control, and visibility.
What we learned, and what we did about it
1. Editing was already sufficient. Deployment was the gap.
Customers validated color, image, text, and background controls as immediately useful, then spent substantially more of every conversation on deployment than on design. One Pilot Flying J stakeholder described needing store-level visibility into what was live where, and framed the absence of it as forcing them into a generic state. So we deliberately deferred advanced layout editing, custom screen composition, and WYSIWYG from MVP, and pointed the post-MVP roadmap at deployment management, scheduling, targeting, and status visibility instead. This is the clearest example of research changing scope rather than confirming it.
“Customer quote here”
2. Approvals are not a feature request, they are how these organizations work.
Every customer described a multi-step review chain spanning marketing, creative, loyalty, and IT. ADUSA described a minimum of three approvers and said outright they would never want one person able to create and push a theme alone. So we treated governance as a foundational requirement and separated editing from deployment in the MVP workflow, rather than building a single create-and-publish path and bolting approvals on later.
“Customer quote here”
3. The real fear is operational, not aesthetic.
The risk customers named was not an ugly screen. It was taking a lane down. ADUSA put it plainly: the big thing is not sending something that brings a lane down. So we constrained editing to supported configurations with engineering and deferred deep configuration editing entirely, keeping Branding Studio in the branding layer and out of device configuration. Guardrails became a design principle rather than a defensive afterthought.
“Customer quote here”
1: Adopt the NCR Voyix back office design system.
Reconciled several years of prior product iterations with the newly established company-wide system for back office products. Built 20 new components where the system did not cover Branding Studio’s needs, and communicated the strategy shift to stakeholders.
Tradeoff: rework of existing patterns and time spent on alignment, in exchange for a product that looks and behaves like the rest of the platform.
2: Separate editing from deployment.
Considered a single create-and-publish flow, which is faster and simpler. Chose separation because every customer’s real approval chain has multiple people in it and the risk of an unreviewed push is operational, not cosmetic.
Tradeoff: more steps and more screens between intent and result. Accepted because governance was the adoption blocker, not speed.
3: Scope to the branding layer, on supported configurations only.
Considered deeper configuration editing and full layout composition. Chose to constrain, with engineering, to protect lanes from accidental impact and to validate core value before building a design platform.
Tradeoff: less creative flexibility, which interviews had already told us customers were not asking for. This is a tradeoff research made safe to take.
The product strategy work came first. I started in February 2026 with the self-checkout UX lead, running competitive analysis to inform strategy and project planning before design work began in late March. MVP designs were delivered in early May. Since delivery I have worked with the lead developer and architect on implementation accuracy for customer demos and internal training, and with two product leads on effort prioritization and strategy refinement. I am supporting enablement alongside technical writers, marketing, sales, and professional services, including walkthroughs used to train internal teams, and I will be in customer feedback sessions directly. Launch sequence is NAMER first, then EMEA, then APAC.
Research pointed the roadmap clearly: targeted deployment with automated scheduling and store lists, permissions, approval workflows, and brand asset management. Those capabilities, not more creative tooling, are what make the self-service promise real at enterprise scale. I am actively exploring which touchpoints Branding Studio should expand to, including cashier display, cashier lane customer display, trilight screens, and in-store display screens, along with the possibility of a layout customizer. Further out, A/B testing, AI-assisted suggestions, and accessibility compliance checks would each raise the ceiling on the product. Priority stays open until beta feedback comes in, which is deliberate.
What I would do differently
Bring customer analytics in earlier. The qualitative evidence here was strong and it genuinely changed what we built, but I want quantitative signal sitting next to it from the start rather than arriving alongside beta feedback.
What stretched me
This was the first product I inherited rather than started. Four years of prior work, a new design system to reconcile it onto, and a strategy shift I had to explain to stakeholders myself. It also moved me from executing product decisions to driving them, which is the shift I want to keep building on.
