Captain DICK's
Mobile
Client-Facing
In-Store
Turn low-value interaction into high-value interaction through an in-store notification system

My Role

UX Designer

Duration

7 weeks, Feb. 2022 - Jul. 2022

Team Member

Aashita Grover, Jessica Fortunato, Sai Charan Bodigutta, Neha Singh Rajpurohit, Samrat Bhasin

Instructor

Raelin Musuraca, Megan Guidi

PROJECT OVERVIEW
DICK’S Sporting Goods (DSG) is a leading company in sporting goods retailing. They challenged the students on the course, Service Design, to design an innovative service that improves customers’ in-store experience. As a designer of the team, I led the team through the prototyping and iteration processes. I also actively participated in the research and analysis part and worked with the team to scope our service idea.

Project Timeline

DESIGN GOAL
Boost the business value by using contextual technology

Teammates (their employees) are valuable assets for DSG. However, many DSG stores are under a teammate shortage, which makes teammates' daily life very busy. To help with this, we designed an in-store notification system to provide athletes with personalized recommendations, self-serve basic product info, and open up high-quality conversations with teammates.

Key Interfaces

Notifications upon Going into Store

Personalized Recommendation

Teammate Recommendation

FEEDBACK & IMPACT
Free teammates and improve athlete satisfaction
We presented our final design to DSG representative in our final presentation and got positive feedback for the converging points we identified that drives great value for all stakeholders.
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BACKGROUND
STARTING WITH "WHY"
"We just need to hire more people."
For DSG, 80% of profit comes from in-store purchases. To best extend the business value, improving the in-store experience is a big thing. However, the current in-store experience is highly dependent on employees, while the employees are not always available due to lack of people.
CHALLENGE
How Might We improve customers' in-store experience without adding burden to the employees?
RESEARCH
SUMMARY
Go to the field and leverage diverse resources
To better understand the problem space, we collected information from various resources. We started from a stakeholder map to understand the sporting goods retailing ecosystem. In our primary research, to get a diverse sample size, we went to 3 DSG stores located in Pittsburgh, PA.

Stakeholder Map

4
Literature Reviews
on the employee management of sporting goods retail stores
5
Competitive Analysis
in the sporting goods stores market
12
Customer Interviews
with people of various age group/gender groups
9
Employee Interviews
with both experienced & amateur teammates
PERSONA
Who are teammates and atheletes?
We found that there are mainly 2 kinds of athletes: athletes with a purpose and athletes without a purpose. Meanwhile, we also identified the goals, frustrations, and motivations for both athletes and teammates. This indicates that our service should serve multiple user bases.
1. There is inconsistency in employee training between stores
Through our guerrilla research in different stores, we found the experiences could vary a lot with different teams.
2. Low-value interactions overwhelm teammates
According to our interviews with employees, most customers would turn to them asking about questions on location/availability of a product, which is considered of relatively low-value and takes up a lot of their time.

A Typical Day of DSG employee

3. Athletes leave without fully exploring the store
According to our observation and interviews, there is still space to encourage customers to explore more about DSG products and encouraging the purchases to take place more.

Customer Journey

DESIGN PRINCIPLES
How Might We improve customers' in-store experience without adding burden to the employees?
With the understandings from our field research, I identified the following principles that could guide our future design for the service

Reduce Low-Value Interaction

Encourage High-Value Interaction

Tap into DSG existing system

DESIGN
IDEATION & PRIORITY
Evaluate ideas by rigorously integrating stakeholder feedback
We crazy 8s and workshop, client feedback, finally decided on designing a contextual in-store notification system based on the existing data from DICK'S app.

Final service idea

Prototyping
Lo-fidelity prototype testing in context
We then came up with the customer flow for the notification system and identified several user scenarios for the notifications to show up.

Customer Journey

With this in mind, I created the lo-fidelity prototypes. Our team conducted a Wizard of Oz user testing session with 5 users.
Integrating more personalized content to encourage customers open the app
Provide customers with clear guidance of the route to a specific product
Final Design
Welcome Notification Tailored to You

Encourage customers to start to use DICK's app

Products Recommendations on Map

Guide customers to products they potentially like by leveraging exisiting data

Inspiring Experts Recommended Based on Your Context

Connects customers with experts to tackle tough questions & form trusted relationships

KEY TAKEAWAYS
Consider the relationship between experiences and purchasing
  • The ultimate goal for stores is to make more profit
  • With the business goal in mind, our service would trigger more valuable interactions
Co-create community with customers
  • Customers will be more motivated if we empower them with certain ability of playing with some low-hanging fruits
  • Stores could save more cost and spare energy on more important things
Visual Execution
SUMMARY
BACKGROUND
RESEARCH
DESIGN
FINAL DESIGN
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