Design leader and UX specialist.
Digitally transforming a
billion dollar business
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, PRODUCT DESIGN, UX
Head of Product & Design, Curtis Fitch Ltd
January 2019 - present​
Mounting headwinds challenge the traditional mining business of the De Beers Group. Global diamond mining has peaked and the natural resources it relies on become scarcer by the day. At the height of the COVID pandemic, I led a design team across a wide-ranging digital program, enabling the De Beers Group to transform manual, time-consuming processes into efficient, connected digital customer experiences.
My work highlighted huge downstream growth opportunities and potential values outside their existing focus on rough diamond sales.
COVID strikes
In March 2020, the WHO officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. There were immediate constraints on the movement of people and products across the world. De Beers customers were unable to travel and the traditional model of holding physical Sight events was not possible. Overall, the business faced a potential $5 billion shortfall in sales.
Objective
In the short term, we needed to demonstrate that customers would buy a range of rough diamonds without being able to physically view them. We had tried to transform this part of the busimess before but had met (mainly cultural) resistance.
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Longer term, we needed to drive much wider digital transformation throughout the business, looking for opportunities away from the traditional sale of rough diamonds. De Beers is a mining company formed in 1888 with a predictable company culture and long-established processes. We knew at the very highest level the organisation had a strategic desire to explore downstream growth opportunities and capture more value outside rough diamonds, but we'd struggled to make any headway in earlier projects.
Here was our opportunity.
Discovery
Working with De Beers' Account Managers, I arranged individual sessions with users from different regions to find out what they would want and need from an online platform, and what concerns they had about moving away from physical viewings.
Diamonds are expensive. No shit, Sherlock. But buying hundreds of rough diamonds for your factory to process into polished stones is really, really expensive. Not the sort of business where you can afford too many mistakes in your purchases.
Customers didn't have enough confidence in the existing data and imagery currently provided online. Data was vague and imagery generally consisted of a single shot the entire parcel, each stone indistinguishable from another. The platform as it existed was a support tool for the physical viewings. Now it would need to offer everything customers got from seeing the stones in person.
Definition
Synthesing the research highlighted three strong themes:
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Provide better imagery
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Optimise the data
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Mobile first
I presented the results back to De Beers stakeholders, using video and audio clips from the research to illustrate the themes we'd identified.
From this presentation, a dedicated data and imagery workstream was started in De Beers. Test photography and scans were commissioned and we worked back through the data already produced as the stones were mined and processed. We found useful data was being captured and stored internally as part of the current stone sorting process.
Taking the themes from the research, and utilising as much of the existing data we thought useful, we started the iterative process of creating conceptual designs and playing them back to users for feedback.
Design
My user research had shown that De Beers' customers travelled a lot as part of their normal work schedule and wanted a strong mobile and tablet exerience. They spent a lot of time in transit and needed a solution that didn't rely on them sitting down in front of a computer or laptop.
There was an appetite in De Beers for a design system but I argued that the scale and maturity of the current work suggested it would be disproportionate. I suggested we start with a cloud-based atomic UI library of compnents and elements that we could evolve into a design system in the future.
Given the research themes, we would focus on the individual product page layout and content, working back up to product listings, search and browse functions. We would design from a universal layout, meaning that any flavour of digital platform could be delivered through different instances or configurations of a single solution. This would have obvious efficiencies in design and development, but also give us the best opportunity to deliver a cohesive user experience across the De Beers digital landscape.
Impact
Risk is relative. We experimented with some limited online events where we listed parcels of lower grade stones with a Buy It Now mechanism. We included the data and imagery the customers had validated through our research. The events were a success and the majority of stones were sold in the first few hours. More importantly, customers gained confidence when they received the stones and could see they matched the data we had published on the sales platform.
Off the success of the test events, we moved into several new digital workstreams with De Beers to explore new opportunities. We created an offering that allowed customers to create their own bespoke parcels of stones. We created a marketplace where customers could find stones being sold by other customers, and sell the stones they didn't need.
We leveraged patterns for online subscription services and created prototypes showing how customers could sign up for a guaranteed supply of the stones they need each month. Customers could set preferences in the system and then sign up for a regular supply of stones. Unlike typical subscription models where you subscribe and save, the De Beers model could be charged at a premium as it meant customers not having to attend Sight events or timed online sales.
We created a conceptual Oculus application allowing customers to view and purchase stones in virtual reality. this wasn't something that made it into production but it was a great exercise in demonstrating what could be done.
Today
I work within a mature program of digital transformation currently underway at De Beers, encompassing many of the themes discussed here. Further innovation projects have picked up the research and the conceptual prototypes we provided. The guaranteed supply project and connected supply chain are both live projects inside a broader online program.
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Today's focus is on the creation of a single, unified platform experience for all of De Beers' B2B digital interactions. This platform is also a launch pad to test B2C and D2C offerings while maintaining focus on the core diamond trading business. We are providing the digital backbone for De Beers to launch new value services in the future.
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The program has a target of $200m by 2030.