New Look Hackathon
Two days to explore how our app can improve the in-store experience
The what, why and who
Whilst many retailers including New Look have ramped up their online digital experience, how can we ensure our offline experience doesn’t get left behind? There are still thousands of bricks and mortar stores all across the country.
In-store conversion is down yet, there is footfall, people are coming inside but are not buying. We went to look at how to engage customers inside the store with the most widely used purchasing platform to the New Look customer, their mobile phone.
Over the two days we split into Team Android vs Team iOS both including an Engineer, Designer and colleagues that gave perspective from the business or delivery domain.
Users
The retail-first company gave us the advantage of having a great quantitative pool of customer stats that were very specific. This enabled us to create good-quality personas that truly resembled users and give us hard numbers to constantly refer to.
It wasn’t just customers experiences that we wanted to enhance, it was the staff’s day-to-day too. We took a guerrilla approach to get these insights. We took the team through these to really instil the people we would be designing and building for.
Day 1
Competitor view:
We went to observe other fashion retailers on Oxford street and identify what digital technologies retailers are utilising in-store and see how these technologies are woven into the physical space and experience, what they are solving, what they are not solving.
New Look view:
To understand what we’re working with we visited our own stores to identify what existing technology we're using in-store, observe how customers are using their mobile devices in our stores currently, and engage with store colleagues, learn from their experience what questions they are most frequently asked, how can technology/ In-store Mode help solve these problems.
Playback
Back to base and our two teams presented what we found, what our expectations of other retailers were and what was the reality, what technologies worked and what didn’t.
Looking at our own store, we weren’t short of things to talk about. Fuelled by the experience, each participant would take their turn to present their own high level problem statements.
We took to Crazy 8’s. Encouraged with the desire for both blue sky thinking and to keep aware of the current strains on technical resource and budget.
After a show-and-tell, teams took a vote on which ideas to gather into a single deliverable solution to work on the next day.
Design, develop, deliver
Both teams, after drip feeding design over to dev came up with two very different yet equally clear cut solutions.
Team iOS focusing on how to introduce AR into the shopping experience and team Android focusing on how AI can solve users in store problems.
Interrogating each others proposals from both, a user, design, business and tech perspective we then presented back to stakeholders the digital department and wider customer experience team.
Following on from the questions and feedback we went to take our prototypes and builds back into store for the most valuable customer and staff member response.
Conclusion
Taking the prototypes into store and talking with both customers and staff members, we asked both open ended and closed questions as well as observing them using the prototype.
Overwhelmingly positive, our findings saw that was a need and appetite for both In-store mode concepts, indeed in need of real refinement we saw our proposed solutions responded directly to the problems of staff members and customers. Feeding back to the business.
New Look have recognised the need to invest in creating a powerful omnichannel experience. Watch this space…
