Smart Shopping Experience for Dick's Sporting Goods
The Challenge
Online shopping has gained a huge importance in today's world, but we cannot get that tactile and visual experience of shopping until we go into a brick and mortar store.
Sapient Nitro gave us a challenge to create a seamless and personalized shopping experience for Dick's Sporting Goods which connects the online store with the brick and mortar store and help the customers to make the buying decision.
The Problem
We began our research by visiting the local Dick's Sporting Goods Store. We observed people while they shopped and then interviewed a few customers and sales representatives.
We found that there are 2 types of users, people who are technophobes who don't shop in the online store at all, and technophiles who use Dick's website and mobile app before they shop.
From our research, we found out that to give a seamless experience we need to consider both the users groups. We also found that the shopping experience for the technophobes begins in the store and ends in the store, but for technophiles, it begins in their homes and ends in the store.
The Solution
To provide a seamless experience for Dick's Sporting Goods, we decided to connect the Dick's website, the smartphone app, and the brick and mortar store to the cloud. Connecting everything to one system will result in creating the seamless experience.
To provide a personalized experience, we created customer profiles which are stored in the cloud. The customer profiles are used to understand the customers preferences and habits based on what they browse on the website in the home, on the phone or in the store and find exactly what they are looking for.
We replaced the traditional Dick's score card with an RFID Smart Card. Using that RFID Smart card, the physical store can know when the customer is in the store, in a specific location in the store, and is looking for something specific. The screens and the kiosks can personally address the customer because they can recognize them because of the card.
As the system connected to the cloud knows what the customer was looking at, the kiosks and screens in the store can give discounts, coupons and expert guidelines to help the customer make the buying decision.
If the customer is a technophobe, he/she can user the help of the sales representative if they have any problems.
We also designed a 3 phase strategy for implementation of this system where the first stage will be connecting to the cloud by getting the infrastructure ready, second phase will be using RFID Scanners for user detection in store and the third phase will be user detection using sensors like the kinect for age and sex detection for proper and personalized marketing.
Result
The UX team at Sapient Nitro was impressed with our concept and we won the first prize for the design challenge. We presented the concept to the UX team of Sapient Nitro over a conference presentation.
My Contribution
I conducted on site observation study and interviews with customers and sales representatives, created personas, created concept sketches and system maps, created illustrations and crafted the scenarios for the concept presentation.
Team Mates
Tony Pattin and Yalu Ye