Dan Murphy’s

Enhancing digital experiences & visual consistency | 2020-2025

The challenge

Dan Murphy’s website, danmurphys.com.au is one of Australia’s oldest ecommerce sites and is a monolithic beast. It is built on bespoke platforms, with a codebase held together by sticky tape & string, and is in a constant state of transformation.

In 2020, the pandemic locked people in their homes and liquor sales soared. Dan Murphy’s was one of the first retailers globally to introduce ‘Contactless Click & Collect’ driving online sales and highlighting the need for new customer journeys and optimised purchase experiences.

With no CMS or Design System, UI design was inconsistent and speed to launch was painstakingly slow.

What we did
(and are still doing)

Designing customer-centric experiences led by data

Over the past five years since the inception of EndeavourX, the Design Practice has been instrumental in evolving the Dan Murphy's website and app.

• Embedded in cross-capability agile squads, designers—typically a UX researcher and UI designer—work closely with BAs, developers, and stakeholders to optimise the customer journey.

• Using the double-diamond approach, they define strategy and explore customer needs before executing optimal solutions.

• By collaborating with Data Analysts, eComm, Marketing, Brand, and Product teams, customer insights drive iterative improvements and the release of new features, ensuring a seamless and engaging digital experience.

• Design focus has been centred around elevating PDP on Desktop as it has the highest AOV, while optimising shallow discovery on mobile web to support ROBIS and omni-channel experiences. App enhancements have resulted in highest share or orders and conversion rate due to highly engaged audiences.

• Retail Media has been a strategic priority to increase revenue opportunities for the business, and design has played a key role in ensuring that advertising included in the experience results in outcomes that are good for the suppliers, good for the business and good for the customers.

Design System

Big audacious goal: To build a world-class design system for Dan Murphy’s* so our people have everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences for our customers (*with grand plans of scale to be Endeavour X multi-brand design system).

• *2020: Strategy and vision including current state problems, future state benefits, user needs, measures of success, audits, alignment with eCommerce 2.0 vision, short & long term resourcing needs, and timely opportunity aligned to Dan’s rebrand.

• *2021: Evolution of maturity, release of MIXER (DSM) library in Sketch integrated with Invision DSM, documentation of all Dan’s foundations and core components. Mixers & Makers weekly governance and education sessions.

• *2022: UI tooling migration to Figma to stay inline with industry best-practice and better support remote ways of working; migration of libraries to Figma. Hallan Moulin hired as Figma systems expert.

• *2023: Extended Design System capabilities to BWS, however as single-brand systems; first engineering resources committed, migration of system documentation and management from Invision DSM to Supernova, Storybook integration. Funding and resources paused.

• 2024: Multi-brand design system approach determined to support digital transformation, unified-front-end and migration to AEM. Led by Hallan, progress recommenced introducing tokens and variables to support multi-brand. The technical genius behind this complex system was UI Designer, Hong Y Nguyen.

• *2025: MBDS yet to be fully released and adopted in all BAU design work, however success has been demonstrated by using Core Components (design + code) in AEM templates. Additionally, the system was extended to add another 2 brands – Nightcap and Nightellier.

Aligning Brand, eComm and Product for better CX

Goal: To partner with Dan Murphy’s Brand & Marketing to better connect brand experience to digital journeys.

• Activated brand champions from UI, eComm and Creative Studio

  • Outcome: Organisational landscape

• Established regular cadence of Brand connection between Marketing, Creative, Design, eComm (and agency reps) to align on goals, roles and responsibilities

  • Outcome: Brand roadmap and prioritisation

• Developed Digital Brand Guidelines and integrated into UI kit foundations

  • Outcome: Figma UI kits for all teams to use

• Mapped and proposed approval gateway with clear criteria

  • Outcome: Clear governance process

• Monitor & measure impact including time saved having clear brand approval process, usage through Figma data, capture consistency enhancements

  • Outcome: Demonstrate ROI every trimester

My role

As UI Chapter Lead for EndeavourX Design Practice, my role was to lead the UI capability, uplift consistency across our digital platforms, establish standardised UI kits and Design System strategy.

• Digital brand guidelines: recommendations with accessibility in mind, adapting colour palettes for AA contrast and type styles for better legibility. Stakeholder presentations of all UI related design decisions that impacted brand.

• Facilitated collaborative working groups with stakeholders including Dan Murphy’s Brand & Marketing, Creative Studio and incumbent agency, Thinkerbell.

• Oversight of all UI initiatives for Dan Murphy’s website, apps, and store-team apps.

• Ensuring UI designers embedded in squads adhered to new brand guidelines, design patterns and best-practice interfaces for web and native apps.

• Incremental cosmetic updates to web and customer apps to replace colours and typography styles to match new brand requirements, requiring extensive QA.

• Audit of Dan Murphy’s colour palettes and adjustments made to digital colours to ensure AA contrast.

• Font audit: led an audit of all fonts across Dan’s digital products, made recommendations to simplify and standardise, reducing a £250,000 GBP fine from Monotype by half.

• Designed templates to help Creative Studio develop campaign assets more efficiently with minimal impact to core UI for hero banners with dynamic pricing and content.

• Development of iconography and pictogram styles for Dan Murphy’s leveraging Orion Icon Library and customising with brand themes.

• A/B testing challenging assumptions of marketers and uplifting conversion.

• *Design System (2020-2023): Strategy, planning, advocacy and component design for the MIXER Design System.

  • Embedded reusability and design system thinking across Design Practice & Creative Studio

  • Creation and adoption of Sketch UI kits and documentation of component usage guides in Invision DSM; transition to Figma and Supernova in early 2022

  • Advocated for MIXER as a key roadmap priority to secure engineering and PM resources, facing challenges in funding, resourcing and leadership buy-in

  • Key learning: Anchor a Design System to a strategic business priority to gain traction, financial and business support (e.g. digital transformation and replatforming).

• Multi-Brand Design System (2025): Following Hallan’s departure in early 2025, after a year away from Design System, I stepped back in as lead. During my time away, immense progress had been made by a few UI designers to build an extensive multi-brand design system with 30+ core components – designed, coded and documented in Supernova.

  • I continued advocating and pitching for resourcing, despite the success demonstrated by the addition of two new brands to the MBDS in record time

  • Led a working group to establish the governance process for contribution or changes to the system

  • Achieved the go ahead from LT for Design System to be released and adopted by all future initiatives for Endeavour’s major brands.

Outcomes

• Brand redesigns for digital interfaces for Dan Murphy’s and My Dan’s (2021 & 2024)

• All unlicensed fonts have been removed from Dan’s digital products and replaced with correctly licensed fonts, mitigating risks of further fines.

• Although still a long way to go, Dan’s digital product features have better consistency in design, colours, typography, styles, iconography and component usage delivering a more cohesive brand experience aligned to Dan’s bricks-and-mortar stores and OOH advertising.

• Enhanced collaboration between eCommerce teams, Marketing and Product teams has reduced friction and internal politics.

• Core components, primitive foundations, brand assets for Dan Murphy’s have been documented and built into MBDS Design System ready for adoption.

• Content is now managed through AEM, leveraging design system allowing for efficient development of eComm campaigns on web and app.

• Dan’s app achieved +5% year on year growth of orders, and holds 53% share of orders.

• Retail Media is thoughtfully embedded in the digital experience without disruption to customer’s journeys.