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This case study showcases expertise in design systems, accessibility and modern UX principles, and highlights adaptability in response to business change.
With continuous business disruption, the design challenge extended beyond aesthetics – requiring a strategic rethink of how the wilko brand stays relevant and trusted online without 400 physical stores and 90 years of high street heritage. The designer tackled outdated visuals, inconsistent components, and usability issues to align the UI with the wilko brand. This work is still in progress, with fewer resources and a long road ahead to define how the wilko brand shows up online.
Picture the scene in July 2022:
- wilko.com had accumulated over 8 years of visual debt by focusing on back-end features, system integration and business initiatives
- The brand promised a friendly and welcoming personality that frees up the time and cash of hard-working families – the website felt cold, prickly and like nobody had cared about it in a while
- No design system, no component libraries, no standards and no source or truth for how the brand should show up in digital form
- CSAT feedback indicated that the site lacked visual appeal – exaggerated comments like ‘…has the dated appearance of the 80’s’ were frequently cropping up
Pre-administration
August 2022 – Crafting and sharing a future state and vision for step changing the core transactional journey and brand foundations on wilko.com (1)
September 2022 – Audit of the global styles and UI components, behavioural research & analysis of core templates (2)
October 2022 – Rollout plan and prioritisation for product listing page (PLP), product detail pages (PDP) and global components (3)
November 2022 – Dev handoff of 1.5 step changes to PLP and PDP
December 2022 – Analysis showed £1.9m projected revenue uplift across 12 months following the first step change release
In 2023, all focus moved to boosting liquidity in attempt to turn the tide. By August 2023, it was game over for wilko despite the digital arm of the business showing significant growth.
Post-administration
Trust in tatters – The fallout from a very public administration had unsettled customers and impacted trust in the brand – fortunately, there was still some love and demand for wilko to return to high streets
Importance of digital – Without a 400 store footprint, the brand would only live on through wilko.com and in parts of The Range stores, so it was even more critical to get it right online
No capacity – Our entire roadmap switched to recovery, rebuild and integration with The Range, leaving no capacity to move the frontend forward or strengthen the digital brand
More downsizing – Fewer than 40 out of 12,500 survived the wilko collapse but more cuts were around the corner and we lost c.90% of our system integrator resource in 2024
So, how do we rebuild trust with almost nothing to do it with?
A new plan to step-change the UI
Foundations – Update the typeface and consolidate 160+ colours into a meaningful system
Mini facelift – Apply minor adjustments across the most widely visited verticals to quickly implement spacing, language, icon and media standards
Structural components – Step-change the header, footer and anything global to inherit best practice standards
UI components – Implement standards across buttons, modals, notifications, tiles and other reusable UI components
CMS components – Make configurable CMS components to replace the manual in-line code that makes up merchandising content to increase efficiency
Step-changed verticals – Optimise all the key verticals in the journey using experimentation
Fast-forward to 2025
7 months after sharing the plan with the product team and securing 10% roadmap capacity, things had stalled again. The roadmap had been turned on its head.
2025 bought with it a turning point and new opportunity in the form of Homebase – another struggling retailer snapped up by The Range.
Homebase was relaunched on the same platform as wilko, so the issues were shared, making it doubly important to fix them.
What gave us the ammunition to go again, was that wilko’s TrustPilot score had plummeted, few of the strategic roadmap initiatives from 2024 showed any sign of ROI and satisfaction survey scores were also declining. The only successful workstream in 2024, that drove £7.67m revenue increase, was experimentation (UX/CRO).
A new vision & future state
I’d kept a rolling future state view since 2022 to guide product decision-making, but it felt as though we’d entered a new era of shopping online and it needed fresh thinking. The thing that stayed true in crafting this vision was basing it on known customer pain points in the journey and the current mental model for shopping online.
New themes for 2025 & beyond
- The advent of AI and how it could reshape the UI and interaction to solve pain points around product information and service clarity
- How our personalisation tools can optimise signposts and page content to help customers find things faster
- How we might tailor product listings and detail pages for different traffic sources and customer needs