Retail Associate
store operations UX
The work of a Best Buy in-store employee means serving customer needs in several key ways that make the way they interact with their retail systems different from most user experiences. After rolling out a set of rapidly developed system adjustments to accommodate the COVID-era, it was time to go back through and optimize the User Experiences and how they worked in a more context-aware way.
I joined the effort and worked on both creating new UX/UI flows (store locker management) and maturing the understanding of the real-world needs of the store personnel. After working directly in stores and backrooms as well as fulfillment centers, I identified and collaborated with a comprehensive group of stakeholders to identify, validate, and triage improvements large and incremental.
Main Problem:
To improve customers' experiences, store systems needed to stay out of the way as much as possible while improving accuracy and efficiency.
UX Activities
Direct field research, Employee surveys, UX Design, Design System re-model, staffing forecast accomodation
KEY CONSTRAINTS: FIRST, WORK WITHIN EXISTING OVERALL PATTERNS
While there was good evidence to recommend a re-imaging and unification of the core store operations platforms, initial deployed changes needed to be incremental without requiring heavy lifts from engineering & development.
"Do you want to buy the warranty?"
Dismal numbers for service plans
Customers weren't buying AppleCare and Geek Squad memberships when picking up their online orders. The existing pattern showed the associate a yellow banner at the bottom of the check-out screen that indicated there were services that could be attached. If they chose to stop and work on the offer they needed to go into a different, content-heavy page filled with all possible options - not just what applied to the goods being fulfilled.
My Design:
(increased from 4% to 21% in attachment sales)
Only the services that were available for the products that were purchased were presented.
The 'taylored' opportunities were integrated into the normal display and the associate (already familiar with the details) could just offer the service and click once to complete the sale. This reduced the associates pressure and made the conversation with the customer easily match the situation. If there was a need to dive further, they could.
Distracted by a customer? No worries, the tool will keep track.
Contextualizing In-store order picking & packing
Employees have many responsibilities and serving the customer in front of them is the most critical. All stores provide both in-store sales and online order fulfillment & delivery. On busy days, picking items, staging them, stocking and packing take a lot of work and the sales floor needs support as well. This means that any one task can be interrupted throughout the day and it caused unacceptable delays and extra work to keep it all straight and still meet deadlines.
My Design:
(eliminated blind spots in service needs)
Introduced time & progress tracking and integrated task flows. In this way, major efficiencies and accuracy were realized by 1) always knowing where a customer order was, 2) enabling anyone to pick-up where someone else left off, 3) alerting the whole team if there were risks to meeting service levels (late order, customer waiting, delivery driver waiting).
Fraud Prevention at the back door
Time of handoff modifications and syncing
"Gig Carriers" fill the last mile for thousands of same-day orders delivered to customer and bad actors responsible for stealing large amounts by exploiting asynchronous hand-off reconciling - claiming not to have picked up orders when they had and taking other orders and not actually claiming them.
My Design:
(enabled theft-prevention to stop any suspicious order hand-off and required real-time carrier syncing)
There were several key improvements in the design of the hand-off system that improved ease of use and accuracy, but the win here was adding a 'handshake' with the carrier systems enabling any changes in order or mismatching to be flagged on the spot.
