Sole Shoes
Understanding how a brand promise translates into a customer experience.

Completed as part of my Graduate Certificate in Service Design at RMIT, this project explored the customer experience surrounding Sole Shoes. I examined how the brand’s positioning connected with the experience of using its service, considering the people, information and interactions that shape a customer’s journey.

My work moved from a reverse brief and service analysis into customer personas, journey mapping and research synthesis. Together, these provided a way to examine the experience from different perspectives and identify opportunities for further design development.

Understanding the service

I began by developing a reverse brief to clarify the project’s focus, examining the business, its positioning and the expectations it created for customers. This established the questions that would guide the work and helped distinguish initial assumptions from areas that needed investigation.

Using the 8Ps of service marketing, I considered how the product offering worked alongside the people, processes and environment surrounding it. Looking across these elements helped frame the customer experience as something shaped by decisions throughout the business.

Seeing it from the customer’s perspective

Customer personas brought different needs, motivations and behaviours into the project. They provided a reference point for considering what people might need from the service, what could influence their decisions and where they might require more information or support.

I used these perspectives to inform the journey mapping, considering customers’ actions, expectations and experiences across their interactions with Sole Shoes. Mapping the stages together made it easier to examine how an expectation formed at one point could affect an experience later in the journey.

Making the experience visible

Visual communication was central to how I organised and presented the work. The challenge was to make a broad set of information clear enough for someone else to follow, while preserving the relationships between individual observations and the wider customer journey.

I applied my graphic design background to the personas, service analysis and journey map, using hierarchy, layout and sequencing to help the reader navigate the material. These artefacts brought the research together in a form that could support discussion and further investigation.

From research to opportunity

Comparing the service analysis with the customer perspectives helped me organise observations into themes and areas for further exploration. This stage involved considering what the research suggested, where assumptions remained and which questions would be most useful to take forward.

The resulting work provided a structured view of the service and a foundation for developing a design response. It also strengthened my approach to defining a problem: taking time to understand the context, looking across connected interactions and being deliberate about how evidence informs a decision.

A broader design practice

Sole Shoes gave me the opportunity to bring research, systems thinking and visual communication into the same project. It expanded how I approach a brief, particularly the questions I ask before beginning to develop a solution.

That thinking carries into my wider design practice, where understanding how people encounter and use something helps shape both its function and its visual expression.

Project context
Academic project — Graduate Certificate in Service Design, RMIT University

Scope
Reverse Brief · 8Ps Analysis · Customer Personas · Customer Journey Mapping · Research Synthesis · Information Design