Medi Doc

Project

Best Buy

Year

2018

Category

Facilitator

Researcher

UX Designer

Synopsis

Crafting a synchronized experience online and in store due to misalignment of information.

Team

Alex Orlov

Diego Mas Gonzalez

Nigel Durham

Best Buy, one of America's biggest brick and mortar electronics chain had a different experience depending on the layout. Many potential customers in-store had something specific in mind, and it was important for them to physically see and compare with other products.

How might we sync the experience between website and in-stores to provide potential buyers a more informative and efficient shopping experience that includes a price comparison, so users can feel confident making the right purchase?

Project Highlights

Research: Contextual Inquiry, screener survey, heuristic analysis
Usability testing of the client's current website
Revise site map and user flows
2 rounds of usability testing to a high-fidelity iteration

12 in-store contextual inquiries

Key Insights

Users come to Best Buy stores for the deals.
They come in-store when they want to see how a product feels in their hands, like a phone case or a watch.

Once in the store for an errand, people might find themselves picking up additional items (replacement headphones) that they didn’t set out to buy.

People seem to be on their phones a lot during the shopping process — either looking up additional deals or texting information (like a photo of a product) to family and friends.
People come into the store when they have time to kill — they might come into Best Buy to browse on a lunch break.

There’s a lot of entertaining things in store — like Nintendo Switch and laptops with WiFi — that can keep waiting friends entertained while their friends pick up a necessary item.

competitive research

Part of our research included competitive analysis, determining who your competitors are, their target audience and how the different types of engagement.

Screener Survey Results

Based on the screener survey, we picked out potential usability testers that have made electronic purchases online and better understand users' approaches.

Heuristic Analysis

We use heuristics to evaluate the strength and quality of what is currently offered to users.
Facilitate critique during planning, design, and development
Predict the effectiveness of a potential solution.

Card Sorting

we conducted card sorting to understand better how people approached categories.
Opportunity to streamline information architecture through the regrouping of products based on users' interpretations.
appears that test participants were organizing products into a generalized sphere of 5 categories, covering household, entertainment, office, and communication. Entertainment is one of the broadest categories we
would circumscribe, covering toys to televisions.
Home and office have very ambiguous and overlapping product lines, perhaps indicating changes in lifestyle for a younger, more tech-focused demographic.

Usability test of existing site

While conducting usability testing, users could either save their items of interest within their saved items or compare products but not save them.
Users who tried comparing items felt really frustrated when they were not able to save them after comparing, which end up wasting the user’s time as they lost their research.
Currently, the option to add an item to compare is signified by a small checkbox below the product’s image which some users missed out on when tasked to add items to compare.

Mid-Fi Usability Testing

Revised site map

condensed the amount of level 2 options presented on the homepage so users do not face the paradox of choice by condensing singular elements into main categories.
repositioned services to be on the right side of the user, since services are mostly engaged after having purchased a product, making a chronological flow of Best Buy’s services.
The level 4 categories were simplified by loading into a new page of product thumbnails, and users can filter the products they are seeking out.