As one of the largest home goods brands in the world, this company had a considerable amount of customers, revenue, and international business.
But it was facing a significant challenge with its online experience.
The challenge
Even though it had an e-commerce website, it didn’t have standardized code—specifically, for two major parts of the business: its online checkout and in-store sales experience.
With the majority of the company’s revenue coming from in-store design-related sales, the lack of a standardized code base was making it difficult for its development team, both in terms of pushing new features and maintenance.
The client chose HFC to help:
- Improve its cart and checkout experience
- Architect an improved release process
- Rebuild its code base in a more streamlined way to minimize repetitive work and human error
- Support its in-house front-end and back-end team with embedded HFC team members to quarterback projects and drive strategy
The company’s consumer-facing online store is a website where customers can browse products and place online orders, whereas the in-store design application is what its associates use to place orders for customers in its brick-and-mortar stores while providing a white-glove “work with a designer” experience.
Although the code for both the online store and in-store design application started off at the same point, it had deviated over the years. This resulted in several problems.
There were often bugs that were fixed in one version but not in another. Features and functionality were lost if they weren’t pushed for both the consumer-facing online store and in-store design application. And even if a team fixed multiple bugs, it could be wiped out entirely when it got to the development branch, which caused the QA and development team to have to do extra work.
HFC’s approach
After years of this approach, the company approached HFC to modernize and improve its user experience in earnest.
When HFC came in, the team assessed the situation and took a holistic approach to the challenge:
- Start with a detailed audit including research, interviews with the client’s team leads, and analysis of the existing code.
- Break releases down into smaller, more digestible components.
- Standardize the architecture by deduplicating and carefully merging together the code that had deviated previously, and using QA regression tests to ensure that no functionality was lost in the transition.
- Design a process that empowered the client’s team to properly build components, feature-flag bugs or issues, and roll out features in a more systematic way.
“We needed to help the client standardize things because they were essentially paying a tax on every feature they were developing."
– Jonathan Zaleski, Director of Technical Architecture, HFC
The results:
To bring things back to basics and create standardized code across the client’s in-store design application and consumer-facing online cart and checkout experience, HFC helped the client’s development team implement industry best practices and designed a process that empowered them to:
- Faster, more predictable code releases due to the team not having to constantly re-implement functionality that was lost during merge processes
- 75% of previous copy-and-paste code eliminated thanks to a new combined code base
- One version, compared to seven or eight different versions of previous code requiring maintenance
- A broad cultural shift as a result of the impact of the partnership with HFC, with client team members proposing more user-oriented solutions that improve the shopping experience for customers
By being able to provide support with delivery transformation, organization, and optimization HFC was able to help this leading home goods brand streamline its complex release process and dramatically improve efficiency across the board for its engineering team.
With this project and other similar projects in the works, the client—and its code base—are now set up for continued worldwide growth and success.
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