THE WHAT
KEY SKILLS
STATS
Project Timeline: 4 months
Industry: Retail
My Role: Project Lead
Team: 2 Researchers, Service Designer
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HIGHLIGHTS
A discovery plan that set the team up to deliver valuable insights, useful frameworks, on time and in budget
Store layout heat maps, illustrating customer flow and friction points
Key learnings from comparative experiences
A future vision that didn’t just solve today’s problems, it filled unmet needs
Measurement strategy
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THE LONG TERM GOAL
The end goal was an in-store experience free of current inefficiencies and confusion points for customers. We needed to understand the inefficiencies so that we could inform the vision and prioritize the redesign of the future customer experience.
OUR APPROACH
We knew we wanted to do in-store observational research. This would allow us to see first-hand what was happening in the stores—identify where frustration points lie and set ourselves up to capture customer reactions while experiences were fresh.
We designed a multi-method approach to be able to share more than just what was going wrong today. The was important to go broader than today’s in-store experience because we weren’t aiming to just set ourselves up to solve today’s problems. We wanted to be able to create a vision of the future, pushing into the possibility of what could be. Our research approach set out to find fully unmet needs, especially as we expended the brand into new markets, that would allow us to not only improve, but evolve the in-store experience.
This method allowed us to paint a bit of a broader brush. Observation gave us insight into all the store pain points, but it also opened us up to unmet customer needs and opportunities for the future role technology could play in-store. Most importantly, we were able to highlight where customers were spending the most amount of time overall, but also broken down by customer archetype.
We planned the comparative analysis to fall after the observation and survey. A lot of broad-strokes competitive data already existed—we knew what competitors in the convenience store space were doing and how we were different—we didn’t want more of that. We took the defined problems and opportunity areas we’d uncovered and looked to specific exemplars to see how others were solving similar problems or filling opportunities. We looked across industries at how customers navigated specific constraints with in-store spaces, in what ways various companies were leveraging in-store technology, and more.
Running research efforts and measurement planning sequentially allows KPIs and metrics to be thought about from the very beginning. Customer experiences can be hard to measure. They are very qualitative and made up of so many touch points. Planning for measurement during research enables researchers to look for possible quantitative indicators of qualitative experiences, capture qualitative benchmarks, and inform measurement plans moving forward.
THE IMPACT
We identified specific changes that could be made within the store layout and generated net new ideas for customer experience with digital touch points. But, our research informed more than the next generation of store layouts. New store layouts take time. For the short term, we identified changes to the store’s existing digital touch points to improve users’ experiences, which are happening in design projects currently.
Check out more of my work:
Improving Telecomm Business Sales