Neiman Marcus - Connect
Once regarded as one of the most innovative fashion retailers, Neiman Marcus had gradually fallen behind in adopting new technologies over the past two decades. This lag significantly impacted both the customer experience and the store associate experience, weakening its competitive advantage in the luxury retail market.
To address this, Neiman Marcus launched the Omni Selling Platform, a massive industry-leading initiative designed to unify systems and create a suite of applications to empower sales associates and enhance the customer experience. Since Neiman Marcus’s unique value lies in the personalized relationships associates build with their clients, the first focus was to design an associate-facing application — later known as Connect.
Problems:
Disconnected Legacy Systems → Information was inconsistent across tools, frustrating both associates and customers.
Fragmented Workflows → Associates relied on multiple tools to complete a single task, which led to wasted time, inefficiency, and service gaps.
Goals:
Seamlessly connect legacy systems to create a unified, consistent experience across all customer touchpoints.
Empower associates with the right tools and information in one place, enabling them to deliver exceptional, personalized service.
Challenge:
The business challenge was steep: deliver the most comprehensive clienteling application in retail within six months. In addition to the aggressive timeline, the team had to work with Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) — a new and evolving technology at the time.
My Role:
As a Senior UX/UI Designer, I was responsible for:
Collaborating closely with cross-functional teams (product, development, legal, and leadership teams).
Gathering requirements from product owners and stakeholders.
Conducting UX research to understand associate workflows and customer needs.
Designing wireframes and translating them into high-fidelity mockups.
Organizing and leading usability testing sessions to validate solutions.
Approach:
At the project kickoff, we collaborated with product owners, development leads, strategy partners, and design stakeholders to define the scope. Together, we identified eight major capability modules under which all functionalities would fall:
Foundations
Checkout
Order Management
Styling & Curation
Client Management
Associate Performance
Communications
Task & Opportunity Management
We dedicated the first two weeks to in-depth exploration of each module — defining the necessary functionalities, prioritizing features, and aligning on which were essential for the MVP launch.
Outcome
By unifying systems and workflows into a single associate-facing application, Connect streamlined the way Neiman Marcus sales associates interacted with customers. The result was a powerful clienteling tool that enabled associates to focus on what mattered most — building personalized, lasting relationships and delivering a luxury experience.
Connect became a cornerstone of the Omni Selling Platform, playing a pivotal role in positioning Neiman Marcus back at the forefront of retail innovation.
Everything was designed to eliminate as much unnecessary effort and cognitive load as possible to help the associates do their work more effectively and without distractions.
On February 16, 2020, we conducted training sessions with our alpha test group — around twenty associates and managers from multiple stores, representing a diverse set of roles. They interacted with the bare-bones MVP version of the Neiman Marcus Connect app, providing valuable feedback that helped us validate workflows and refine the experience.
Just one month later, on March 18, 2020, we launched Connect to over 5,000 users across the organization — coinciding with the sudden closure of all Neiman Marcus stores due to the COVID-19 shutdown. Despite the unprecedented disruption, the timing of the launch proved critical. With physical retail operations halted, the Connect app empowered associates to continue serving customers directly from their phones while working from home.
This unexpected shift highlighted the true value of the platform: it became a lifeline for sales associates, enabling them to maintain relationships, drive sales, and deliver personalized service in a time when in-person interactions were no longer possible.
