Future of Retail Experience Design Project

duration: 10 weeks | client: home improvement retailer

During my first year in my master’s program, one of the largest home improvement retailers posed the following question for my team to solve: “What will the future of retail look like in 1, 3, and 5 years?” The retailer was facing the new reality that many brick-and-mortar businesses were grappling with - how to adapt to an increasingly digital world.

Our first step in answering this question was to fully understand the customer’s experience today, and what their underlying desires and needs were before, during, and after their shopping experience. Our team conducted comprehensive user research: from in-home interviews, drawing exercises, and shop-alongs. These are all excellent methodologies to capture in-the-moment feedback. We interviewed participants that were in various stages of the home improvement lifecycle: those seeking inspiration, researching a planned project, executing a project, or recently finished a project. It was important for us to uncover an opportunity for our client to meet a currently unmet need that will be difficult for its competition to replicate.

What we uncovered is that in many cases, home improvement is not a passive straightforward chore. It is an emotional, complex journey that often involves the entire family. Completing a home improvement project is often representative of caring for your family, building cherished memories, and leaving a legacy for your loved ones. Our team believed technology would obviously unlock ease and simplicity in the future retail experience. But probably less obviously, it would be crucial for our client to leverage that technology to reflect this very human need - family bonding - in its home improvement retail experience.

This insight, along with macro retail trends towards more personalized and omni-channel shopping experiences, was the driving force behind the design of our new home improvement retail experience that was focused on better serving families. This experience was highly interactive, and expanded outside of the physical store into the digital world. A metaphor we often drew upon for inspiration was: “The IKEA of Home Improvement”. The concept incorporated the needs and desires of each member of the family, from children and teens to adults. We brought this design to life by developing low-fidelity paper prototypes that our clients could see and interact with as we brought them along the journey with us.

Our proposed retail experience showed our client that they could be uniquely positioned to better serve their customers by providing an engaging experience for everyone in the family.