Introduction

Decathlon, founded in France, is the world’s largest sporting goods retailer, operating in over 60 countries. I led end-to-end UX research and design for an internal auditing platform used by audit teams across multiple regions.

The core design challenge was understanding how cultural context shapes the way users interpret interfaces, structure their workflows, and form mental models of a tool. To investigate this, I conducted generative research combining semi-structured user interviews and contextual inquiry with participants from diverse cultural backgrounds, complemented by behavioural observation of real auditing tasks. The research surfaced two recurring pain points that manifested differently across user groups: high friction during first-time onboarding, and cognitive overload caused by an unclear information architecture and visual hierarchy. I redesigned the onboarding flow using progressive disclosure and embedded tutorials to reduce time-to-first-value, and refined the visual hierarchy with a more intentional, semantic use of colour to improve scannability. Pre- and post-deployment benchmarks using UMUX-Lite and NPS validated the impact, showing a 20% increase in operational efficiency and measurable gains in perceived ease of use.