Case Study Title

A tagline is descriptive.

Overview

The leadership team at Best Buy was determined to reshape their in-store experience by creating a collection of digital tools for customers and sales associates.

TEAM & DURATION

My role was principal UX designer with additional focus on content strategy , research and client management. I worked closely with creative directors, visual designers and account managers from our partner agency at Sequence.

TOOLS & METHODS

Design strategy and concept design
Interaction design for web, mobile and tablet
Art direction for UX visual design
User interviews
Contextual inquiry

Competitive Research

Comparing the Blanton in relation to two e-commerce competitors, Museum of Art Vs. RISD Works

The Problem

“I’m just looking around, thanks”

One of the biggest challenges facing Best Buy is the trend towards “showrooming;” that is, the tendency for customers to browse items in the physical store but to order online from another retailer. We learned early on that showrooming is a symptom of a deeper problem: Customers have trouble knowing which tech products to buy on their own and, at the same time, they do not value interactions with the sales associates who could guide them. As a result, customers often leave Best Buy stores before feeling confident enough to commit to a purchase.

The Solution

Provide a familiar e-commerce experience and increase community engagement through memberships.

The big idea was to support customers’ access to product information by connecting store visits, research at home or on the go, and multiple device types. The in-store sales experience played a prominent role in our approach: We created a tablet app for sales associates that allowed for accessing and capturing customers’ preference details and for completing purchases on the sales floor.

Process

Move Fast with stakeholders

Get Messy Early

We filled our days in these early parts of the project with rough sketches, white-boarding and participatory design sessions with the client, and lots of ideas jotted down on post-it notes. This helped us wrap our heads around a problem that spanned different users, associates, locations and devices.

INVITE USERS INTO YOUR PROCESS

The second part of our approach was to invite users and customers into our process. One of our most effective strategies was to test our hand-drawn sketches with users and to iterate the sketches within or between each testing session. We even handed our sharpies to users and let them sketch out their own ideas.

RESEARCH IN CONTEXT

The success of our design hinged partially on customers’ willingness to embrace in-store digital tools which, from a research perspective, meant we needed to go beyond testing interfaces to testing experiences in the retail context. Our research activities included visits to customers’ homes throughout the U.S. and to the Best Buy prototype store near Minneapolis.