iOS App Home Tab Evolution
2023 Black Friday - The iOS app made record breaking sales of $11 million
2025 Black Friday - Further enhancements delivered $18 million in sales
How did we do it? Let’s take a time machine back to 2022.
Role
Product Design lead
Date
2022 - 2025
Company Overview
American Eagle Outfitters, a global retailer with $5.34 billion annual revenue. The app contributes 40%+ of total digital business.
Business Problem:
While the home screen receives 90% of the traffic, its content is powered by outdated services, requires manual app releases for updates, and features an obsolete UI.
Competitive Analysis
To inform our strategy for the app, I looked at 23 retail competitors to identify key differences in product content between their mobile web and iOS app experiences.
Approach #1: 61% (14/23) have both mirrored site and app unique content.
Approach #2: 26% (6/23) have unique content per channel
Approach #3: 13% (3/23) have mirrored site and app content.
I suggested that the business and marketing teams adopt Approach #1. Combining mirrored and unique content ensures our app users receive the most relevant information possible.
Experience Problem:
After multiple rounds of user interviews and listening labs with 100+ users on customer mental model of our app, home tab and shopping. We learned that:
Content wasn't updated frequently enough for high-frequency app users (6.9 purchases per year vs. 2.3 for web users)
Content felt irrelevant, lacked personalisation, and had low product engagement
Usability Test
With these learnings in mind, I made an “ideal” design combining actual mobile web product content with personalised content and conducted a usability test with 12 users.
75% (9/12) found it met or exceeded expectations
“It’s so intuitive…It’s funny because has everything that I just said I wanted”
— 35, female. Income: $20,000 - 39,999
Phased Testing and Execution:
For a project of this magnitude, I worked with product managers and the engineering team to carve out phases so we can test our hypothesis and monitor user behaviour over time.
Phase 1: 2023
New UI and CMS integration for offers
AB Test Result: +$2.3 million projected annual revenue lift.
Phase 2: 2023 - 2024
New UI and CMS integration for product content (allowing gifs, videos, countdown clocks).
Business Unlock: the marketing team could use a single tool to execute flexible content across both the website and app platforms.
Phase 3: 2024
Optimize search algorithms and search presence on the home tab
AB Test Result: +$5.64 million projected annual revenue lift
Phase 4: 2025
Personalise shopping recommenders and display loyalty rewards
Loyalty AB Test: (+0.32% conversion lift; +0.33% RPV lift) loyalty data?
Recommenders AB Test: ongoing
Consistency + Scalability:
While scaling our successes, I ensured the design remained flexible across different brands and regions:
Supported Multi-Brand Integration: Designed for the Aerie and Offline brands sharing the same app ecosystem.
Localised for Global Markets: Adapted use cases for the Canadian, Mexican, and International versions of the iOS app.
Cross-Platform Alignment: Developed feature parity for the Android app to ensure a consistent user experience.
What did I learn?
Be flexible. For projects that require multi-phased testing and funding, learnings can change the direction or the plans
Be patient. Each step should be tested and validated before moving on to the next. This cannot be done in one step.
What’s next?
Continue to test personalised recommenders. Even though users asked for product recommendations, this has not performed positively in AB tests. We have another test planned in 2026 to test other designs, placement and the algorithm of the recommenders