Scaling Research for Strategic Decisions

Embedding Research into Strategic Planning

The Company is best known for its iconic Swiss Army Knife, but its digital ecosystem had grown into something far more complex: multiple eCommerce platforms, service portals, and brand-led websites operating across markets and systems.

As the ecosystem expanded, delivery speed increased faster than shared clarity. Platform and feature decisions were increasingly driven by internal opinion, legacy assumptions, and isolated performance metrics. The risk was not slow delivery, but accelerated launches without validating user impact or accessibility implications.

As a Senior UX Researcher, I worked across product, marketing, engineering, and service to raise UX maturity, integrate research into decision-making, and restore a shared definition of success across platforms.

Challenge

The Company was undergoing a major transformation: a move from a monolithic commerce platform to a composable, headless architecture; the launch of new digital platforms; and an ambition to increase eCommerce performance globally.

At the same time, accessibility requirements were rising, internal ownership was fragmenting, and teams were under pressure to deliver quickly.

The core challenge was not change itself, but how to make high-impact decisions during change without relying on assumptions, internal opinion, or partial metrics.

Strategy

 

I led a research-led transformation focused on turning fragmented signals into shared evidence, structured around four pillars.

Continuous Discovery

I embedded mixed-method research across web properties to surface behavioural friction early and create a steady flow of decision-ready insight.

Across platforms and over time, one pattern remained consistent: persistent friction around navigation clarity and content hierarchy. Users repeatedly struggled to understand where they were in the journey and how to progress, particularly in product exploration and service flows.

This loss of clarity often translated directly into reduced confidence and trust, as captured in usability sessions: “Everyday’ is too vague, what is everyday for a forester is not everyday for an office worker.”

and more explicitly at category level: “When I look at a category, I just want to see all the knives and know what makes them different. If I only see a few and the labels are vague, I don’t trust I’ve found the right one.”

These observations reinforced that the issue was not visual design, but semantic precision and hierarchy.

Cross-functional Enablement

I worked closely with eCommerce, Development, and Marketing to translate research findings into prioritisation inputs, ensuring insights informed roadmap, content, and feature decisions.

Operationalising Accessibility

I acted as a point of escalation for digital accessibility, embedding WCAG requirements into delivery processes so compliance became a design and development concern rather than a late audit.

Platform-First Thinking

During the SAP Commerce Cloud migration, I supported the evolution of the design system to meet new development constraints, enabling consistency across Community Online, B2B, and brand platforms while preserving flexibility.

Execution Highlights

Revenue Optimisation via UX Research

I combined behavioural analytics (ContentSquare) with usability testing on key product subcategories to understand where personalisation and navigation workflows broke down.

To monitor impact, we tracked scroll-depth patterns, navigation interaction sequences (such as filter use and category switching), add-to-cart initiation points, and hesitation indicators including repeated backtracking and prolonged dwell time on decision screens.

These signals helped distinguish genuine engagement from uncertainty-driven interaction and guided targeted adjustments to structure and content.

Service Blueprint for Repairs

I mapped the end-to-end journey for the Repair Service, connecting frontend interactions with backend processes. The service blueprint exposed misalignments between user expectations and internal workflows, creating a shared reference for operational and experience improvements.

Platform Migration Support

During the transition to a headless architecture, I partnered with development and content teams to maintain UX coherence across releases. Documentation and design-system updates helped balance speed, branding, and consistency during parallel launches.

Accessibility as a Cultural Shift

I introduced a structured roadmap aligned with WCAG Level AA and tracked accessibility signals over time.

Recurring failures in semantic structure, contrast inconsistencies, and keyboard-navigation traps clearly indicated systemic design-system issues rather than isolated defects. This evidence proved decisive in prioritisation discussions and shifted accessibility from reactive fixes to structural improvement.

Outcome

This work helped reposition UX research as a stabilising force during transformation.
Decisions became more evidence-led, accessibility risks were surfaced earlier, and platform changes were supported by a shared understanding of user behaviour.

We shifted from release-driven decision-making to evidence-informed prioritisation, using research as a standard checkpoint rather than an optional add-on.

Reflection

Scaling UX research in this context was less about introducing new methods and more about changing how certainty was earned.

When research consistently showed where assumptions failed, and when signals were shared across teams, UX moved from being a support function to a source of clarity during change.

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