Research and Strategy
Roots Canada
Modernizing a national retail brand without losing what built it
Led a full digital audit and redesign for one of Canada's most recognizable retailers, resolving years of accumulated inconsistency while protecting the brand customers came for.
- Role
- Strategy and UX Lead
- Focus
- Discovery research, Information architecture, Journeys, Employee experience
Context
Roots is one of Canada’s most recognizable retail brands. Its digital experience had grown by years of point fixes, each justified at the time, none audited as a whole. I led a complete audit and redesign as strategy and UX partner, embedded onsite with the in-house team.
The challenge
A redesign could not be a re-skin. Navigation hierarchies competed with each other, and frontline staff worked from different sources of truth than the customers they served. The work had to be an information architecture decision, a content decision, and a staff-experience decision at once, without weakening the brand’s emotional pull.
My role
Strategy and UX lead, embedded onsite, running discovery through to the live build alongside engineering.
Approach
- Ran stakeholder discovery, customer surveys, and in-store employee interviews across five locations.
- Co-designed strategic journeys across in-store and online in onsite working sessions.
- Streamlined the information architecture to resolve years of category overlap.
- Treated store staff as a first-class user, since they are the bridge between brand and customer.
Outcome
Roots gained a coherent information architecture and a working component model its in-house team could extend, and an experience that felt like one place across store and online rather than two.
What I learned
Sitting inside the building compressed the feedback loop to hours and built genuine ownership of the decisions. The lesson that stuck: design the seams between channels, not just the screens.
Work with me