People, Not Percentages: Research & Design For Cross-Channel Experiences
80 years ago, the bar for a retail experience was low. A simple shelf in a gas station was enough to display our company's initial product line. Today, that won't cut it. Today's designers have to incorporate scores of inputs, from how our customers encounter our products online and in the real world, to multiple departmental budgets and timelines converging around a campaign. In this environment, it's easy for customer perspective to get lost. And yet customer experience is more important than ever. "Experience" is the secret sauce that will save physical stores from Internet giants. For designers, experience can be an overwhelmingly broad and loosely defined concept that is dependent on context and requires a rich understanding of the people for whom we are designing. As leaders within our company's design and research teams, we’ll walk through our experience research and design approach via a case study of REI’s recently redesigned camping department. We'll share this process in detail: understanding customers in their authentic context; comparing information behavior in the physical and digital worlds; fostering customer-centricity on diverse design teams; carrying this empathy through physical space design, prototyping, and iteration; and navigating the politics of experience design.
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People, Not Percentages: Research & Design For Cross-Channel Experiences
- 1. People, Not Percentages Research & Design For Cross-Channel Experiences by Allan Kempson, Nikki Easterday, and Stuart Maxwell presented by Stuart Maxwell, Lead Information Architect, REI @stumax, turninggrille.com Slides: bit.ly/peoplenotpercentages
- 2. Austin buys a tent Part One
- 4. Austin is going backpacking and wants to buy a new tent.
- 5. He starts looking for tents online.
- 6. Austin goes to the closest store.
- 7. Austin finally talks to an REI employee.
- 8. The employee saves the day!!
- 9. How can we make this better?
- 10. This is an information space.
- 12. A process for design Part 2
- 15. We started as a specialty retailer.
- 16. But we started to act like a Big Box retailer.
- 17. We need to get back to our roots.
- 18. Allan Kempson Manager, Customer Experience Research and Design (CX) Nikki Easterday Experience Design Manager, Store Design and Visual Merchandising (SDVM) Meet Allan and Nikki.
- 20. Store Design / Visual Merchandising Customer Experience Research Physical Architects Retail Operations Store Employees Merchants Digital Retail Outdoor Adventure & Programs Senior Leadership Stakeholders for designing a physical space
- 26. 3a. Affinity diagramming workshops Phase two: HQ stakeholders
- 28. 5. Architect Design Development (but first study all the things) CX research Stakeholder research and requirements
- 29. 6. Share with leadership; get their input
- 30. 7. Refine
- 31. 8a. Build a low-fi prototype and iterate
- 32. 8b. It’s messy.
- 33. 8c. It gets worse.
- 34. 8d. It gets better.
- 35. 8z. It gets done..
- 36. 9. Bring in-store employees and customers to test
- 38. 11. Build in a pilot store (It gets messy again).
- 39. BEFORE
- 40. BEFORE
- 41. BEFORE
- 42. AFTER
- 43. AFTER
- 44. AFTER
- 45. AFTER
- 47. 13. Iterate and continue to refine for more stores
- 48. Findings and actions taken Part Three
- 49. 1Finding Why people come to the store
- 50. 75 - 88% of customers start shopping online
- 51. Customers visit a store to touch, feel, and sense
- 52. Customers come to the store to get questions answered
- 55. Promote conversation through experience
- 57. Customers had to wander the gondolas
- 59. We flipped the taxonomy
- 60. CAMP SHOP TENTS STOVES COOK GEAR LIGHTING CAMPING BACKPACKING CAMPING BACKPACKING CAMPING BACKPACKING CAMPING BACKPACKING
- 61. CAMP SHOP CAMPING BACKPACKING TENTS STOVES COOK GEAR LIGHTING TENTS STOVES COOK GEAR LIGHTING
- 67. And it works!
- 68. What we learned Part 4
- 69. You can’t empathize with a statistic
- 70. We need to work hard and fast to understand the customer
- 71. Intellectual needs vs. sensing needs
- 72. We need to rethink our taxonomies
- 73. Involve everybody in the process
- 74. Involving everyone helps you as much as them
- 75. We framed the experience with objective measures
- 76. We brought clarity through a customer- focused understanding of the experience
- 77. Where do we go from here?
- 78. The challenge for Digital Retail
- 79. Take what we learned and move forward
- 80. 1 Invest in mixed-methods customer research Take what we learned and move forward
- 81. 1 2 Involve everyone in everything Invest in mixed-methods customer research Take what we learned and move forward
- 82. 1 2 3 Focus on people, not percentages Involve everyone in everything Invest in mixed-methods customer research Take what we learned and move forward
- 83. Thanks! by Allan Kempson, Nikki Easterday, and Stuart Maxwell presented by Stuart Maxwell, Lead Information Architect, REI; @stumax, turninggrille.com Special thanks to: Mahsino Blamoh, Jordan Cordas, Louise Maxwell Slides: bit.ly/peoplenotpercentages All images ©2016 Recreational Equipment, Inc.
- 84. Discussion
- 85. The cutting room floor
- 87. We go backpacking!! We go backpacking!!