THE PROBLEM

One of the major advantages that Best Buy has over their online competition is the ability for customers to pick up and shop for items locally in their over 1000 stores. To leverage this, my product team was given the task of coming up with of a ‘Pick Up Today’ option for list pages and item pages. Customers would then be able to view items that are available in their local area immediately, while browsing Best Buy’s website.

MY ROLE

As UX Architect on this project, I worked with fulfillment and our business partners to document the various conditions and options that users would be faced with on various items. Once this information had been collected, I then began work on how this information could be surfaced in the existing shopping experience. Since many customers have the ability to easily travel to multiple Best Buy locations in their area, the ability to easily switch between them to locate in-store items was a top priority.

Our data also indicated that at a product category level, customers that were in the early purchase phase were more interested in ‘what can I physically get/see today, rather than ‘which location has [specific model]’. For example: a customer may be looking to purchase a new HDTV for their living room. This customer may only know a few things about their needs: size, features, etc. But they are unsure about other aspects, and would like to easily filter their choices down to what is in their nearby store. Using this knowledge, it was decided that a tabbed interface for the Product Listing Page would allow customers to get an informed view of their local options. The tab would include the number of local items matching their current browse filters, and would update based on their store choice.

With all of this information in place, I created a set of wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes to outline and capture the various states and interactions of the new feature. The high-fidelity prototypes for desktop and mobile were then used by our internal research team to validate our work.

THE OUTCOME

The new Local Store Availability feature went from concept to deployed feature in about a month. Customers were now able to get a more focused view on the products they could shop for locally. This translated directly to increased sales, as there was a sharp uptick in the amount of local pickup transactions through Best Buy’s website.