Sophie Lancaster

The Children's Place

The Children's Place project cover

Helping The Children’s Place develop their 2022 digital roadmap with prioritized high-impact ideas.

  • Role: Experience designer — research, ideation and visualization

  • Team: Cross-functional strategy team (design, research, client)

  • Timeline: 6 week innovation engagement

  • Client: The Children’s Place

  • Scope: Competitive research, idea generation and concept visualization

The Challenge

Accelerate The Children’s Place’s digital growth by refining their 2022 roadmap — focusing on five opportunity areas including uniform destination, next-gen homepage, loyalty & brand credit card, multi-brand experiences, and ratings & reviews.

My Role & Ownership

Led research, ideation refinement, and Figma visualization of concepts; partnered with the team to present weekly insights and support design decisions.

Context & Constraints

  • Worked within a set of pre-existing client ideas that needed validation

  • Research had to complement — not duplicate — client efforts

  • Tight weekly cadence of deliverables and client feedback loops

Key Decisions

  1. Prioritized Research to Clarify Real Opportunity

    We audited client-provided ideas before ideating, reducing redundant work and realigning effort toward problem areas with real potential.

  2. Structured Ideation Process for Alignment

    Used a crawl/walk/run system to categorize and refine ideas, increasing clarity and enabling sharper prioritization across stakeholders.

The Solution

Current State Research → Competitive Benchmarking → Ideation → Concept Visualization

We delivered:

  • Current state and competitive evaluations per opportunity area

  • Weekly prioritized concepts visualized in high-fidelity mockups

  • Concept decks presented directly to the The Children’s Place team (final concept deck here)

Next-gen homepage

Ratings & reviews

“Ratings & Reviews Snapshot” at top of PDP

Include related comments based on search phrase

Redesigned PDP review section

Multi-brand experiences

Cross-brand recommendations on PDP

Uniform destination

Shopping by child

Added functionality to aid in fit confidence

AR tool used to obtain child’s measurements

Loyalty & brand credit card

MPR exposure as sticky banner across site

Earn bonus points on your signup anniversary

Walk homepage concept

Crawl homepage concept

Allow users to retroactively catalog points

Streamline My Place Rewards (MPR) info

Avoid cart abandonment by providing bonus points

Outcomes & Impact

  • Delivered a prioritized list of 10 ideas ready for The Children’s Place leadership budget allocation

  • Strengthened client trust through clear, research-backed presentations

  • Enhanced The Children’s Place roadmap with both incremental and strategic growth concepts

Reflection

This project sharpened my ability to pivot quickly mid-engagement and solidified how structured ideation frameworks create clarity in high-ambiguity environments.

“Sophie’s research-driven work helped the team look at problems with a different perspective and was a great asset.”

— Wonjun Song (Team Member)