Driving Retail Innovation Through Experience Research
Company: Best Buy
Date: 2018-2019
Brief: Led end-to-end UX research initiatives focused on improving the tools and services used by Best Buy’s in-store employees. Partnered closely with business stakeholders to uncover friction in the selling experience and identify opportunities to better support employees in delivering customer value.
High Level
My Role:
Planned and executed exploratory, evaluative, and concept testing research.
Facilitated cross-functional workshops to align on insights and opportunities.
Developed journey maps to visualize the end-to-end employee experience.
Established a research baseline for key selling tools to guide future decisions.
Opportunities:
Gaps in tool usability impacting employee efficiency during sales interactions.
Inconsistencies across the selling journey that created friction for employees.
Opportunities to better support decision-making in real-time customer conversations.
Recommendations Provided:
Informed prioritization of future feature development across selling tools.
Delivered actionable recommendations that improved usability and workflow efficiency.
Enabled teams to align around a shared understanding of the employee experience.
Research Process
Phase 1: Scoping
To me, scoping research consists of identifying goals, setting objectives, determining methodology, and providing a vision for the end result of your work. All of this means communicating with your team as much as it takes to make sure everyone is in alignment throughout the process.
I do this by meeting both formally and informally with team members and planning out the project in advance. Throughout this intake process, I am looking for what the team needs to know to have confidence moving forward, and I collaborate to identify how we might gain this knowledge.
Phase 2: Conducting Research
Once the team has aligned on a strategy for getting the information they need, it comes time to conduct the research. Some methodologies I have used include:
Observations
Interviewing
Usability Testing
Concept Testing
Secondary Research
Surveys
Phase 3: Analyzing Data
As a researcher, this has been one of my favorite aspects of the process - synthesizing and analyzing data. Since much of my past experience deals with quantitative data, I have enjoyed the chance to focus on a lot of qualitative studies. Making sense of rich information and tying together concepts and patterns in a way that is easily digestible and actionable to others is really the crux of being a researcher to me.
Phase 4: Consulting the team
Once research has been synthesized and can be passed along to inform and make recommendations, the job becomes to facilitate a shared understanding of the findings and continue to consult as needed with the business and other stakeholders.
Journey Mapping & Workshop Facilitation
Why make a map?
Cross functional collaboration.
Alignment across the organization on a common story.
The distribution of research findings.
An opportunity to address pain points.
A unique perspective - starting from the view of the employee instead of the business.
