Black Friday ShopGuard
My role
Design: Wireframe, Prototyping
Project Management
Overview
Improving Black Friday In-store shopping Experience.
We collaborated with two UX researchers from Best Buy, Andy Hunsucker and Gabe Persons. We had weekly calls with them to discuss our research and design frameworks. This helped my team and me understand the feasibility of our ideas.
Duration
Team
The Challenge
As a designer, I was challenged to devise a solution to retain the excitement—and perhaps the nostalgia—of shopping on Black Friday while keeping people safe and without overburdening employees.
The Solution
Research
• 79 Customers survey
• 5 Employee interviews
- Employees need to check inventory for customers constantly.
- Most of the “crazy rush” happens during the checkout process, and store pick ups.
- Most customers on Black Friday know exactly what they’re looking for.
User Profile
How Might We...?
Ideation
1. Self-serve
If customers are in the store, they can serve themselves when facing basic demands. For instance, search or find products quickly by using Best Buy application. This not only can make customers feel free while they are shopping, but release the burden of employees when there are too many customers need more complicated problems.
2. Virtual Lines
Rather than crowding around an employee waiting for help. Customers scan the QR code of a product and then the only thing is to wait for the response of an employee. Like famous breadcrumb navigation widely used on websites showing that users are eager to know where they are and their current status, virtual lines let people know the lasting time they need to wait, in other words, knowing their current status eases their anxiety and impatient.
3. Search & In-store Navigation
We try to simulate the online shopping experience by allowing the customers to search for items and get the direct navigation for certain items in store. The customers can also receive certain recommendations after searching items.
4. Self-checkout
Customers can scan the items they wish to purchase and add it to their virtual shopping cart. They can proceed to self checkout and make the payment. If the item is big, then an employee will hand it over to them.
5. Scan & Add
Customers can simply scan the QR code for a specific item in order to add it to the vitual cart.
Draft Concept & Wireframe
User Testing
We created prototypes to observe how users interact with the app.
Participants were asked to complete tasks while we observed their interactions and noted difficulties. Then we gathered our notes and analyzed the data, identifying common struggles and areas for improvement.
We made necessary design changes to address identified issues, aiming to enhance usability and user satisfaction.
Participants were stuck by the login process/ create an account.
Instore navigation doesn’t help browsers.
Before: “I don’t know what to buy and I just want to browse during sales and look for something I might need.”
Iteration: We divided customers into two groups and made two different modes for them: “specific product mode” and “browser's mode”.
The Flat Map is not intuitive to users.
Before: “The flat map confused me and I’d rather find products by physical signs in the store.”
Iteration: We got inspiration from the “Live view” of Google Maps, people can be navigated by live view in the store. Customers don’t have to read the flat map and recognize where they are. They can just follow the arrow/routes on their phones.
Reducing friction and following the learning curve are necessary.
Before: “It’s different from the current Best Buy application, maybe an introduction can help me to get familiar with this product.”
Iteration: We evaluated the equitable of this products, and then we decided to add "onboarding"/ introduction before users start using it.
Final Design
Reflection
This project presented me with the opportunity to understand how to work with industry partners. The biggest challenge during this impressive journey was transferring demands into the design. We were always overwhelmed with tons of data and information. We expected to come up with a perfect solution to the problem and we generated many concepts. The reality is we cannot find a perfect way, we made decisions by evaluating factors that may change users’ behaviors, and we facilitate the issues through constant iterations.