Overview

Challenge

Key Insights

Solution

Impacts

My Contribution

Process

Narrowing Down Problem
Space

Design Workshop

Customer Journey Map

Generative Metaphor

Ideation

Initial Concept and
Prototype

Testing and Iteration

Prototyping AR Experience

Final Design

Reflection

Future Steps

What I Learned

Acknowledgement

Fit Your Place

A size filter recommending items based on customers’ real home setting.

THEME
Individual Intern
Project

DURATION
June 2019 - July 2019
3 weeks +
1 week for Prototyping
in Oct. 2019

ROLE
UX Designer
Interaction Designer
UX Researcher

TEAM
Mark Felcansmith(Director)
Marcus Hamilton (Manager)
Nimrod NegosaJr (Mentor)
Tanmay Mhatre (Mentor)
Rishabh Bhardwaj (Mentor)
Andrew Retana (Mentor)

Challenge

Home business on digital platform always makes up a large part of the Kohl’s business. However, 2019 has been a slow start for Kohl’s key business. In Quarter 1, online sales of both Hard Goods and Soft Goods decreased dramatically. As a UX design intern, I was challenged to come up with a design concept to increase customer’s affinity of Kohl’s for Home. In this project, I was encouraged to think out of box and explore the innovative and visionary solutions that might couldn’t be developed instantly.  

According to the reports done by researcher folks, Kohl’s primary Home opportunity is reliability perceptions, more specifically, is to make customers think they can count on us to have everything they want. After organizing an ideation workshop, I reframed the challenge as:
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How might we provide an efficient online browsing experience based on customers’ personalized needs in Home (department) so that customers will trust kohl’s to have what they want?

Key Insights

How do customers shop for home? What is their need? What are the essential factors? What prevent them from getting what they want? Finally, I got these overriding key insights. I also generated an interesting metaphor to synthesize the insights:

CONTINUOUS SHOPPING

There are two general types of Home shopping, which are relocation shopping and continuous shopping. Customers’ needs are much more complex and personalized for continuous shopping than for relocating.

REQUIREMENT ON SIZE

For continuous shopping, customers have very personalized size requirement according to their room setting. The size requirement is also the decisive factor for customers, more important than price, style, etc.

NEED INSPIRATIONS

Customers don’t always know what exactly they want at the beginning, so they expect some inspirations of how to fill a certain space.

Solution

I added a new type of size filter called Fit Your Place to the Kohl’s mobile App. This filter leverages AR technology enabling customers to define a customized area in the real physical environment. Then it will filter out the products which could fit in this defined area. Besides showing the products that customers searched for, the system will also inspire customers by recommending other types of products matching the style of the environment. To finalize the detailed interactions, I used paper prototyping technique to prototype, test and iterate the AR experience.

Impacts

In the e-commerce industry, existing features of fitting personalized space only work after customers select a certain product. They work well for relocation shopping because it's easy to fit an empty room. However, for continuous shopping, Fit Your Place feature would work better because it supports setting-driven shopping approach. This approach has two main benefits:

Increase the findability of fitted items 

The filter could give available fitted items right away rather than customers research on an item for long time and find out it doesn't fit. This will result in higher reliability perception on Kohl's Home.    
Help customers figure out what they want  

For customers who are not sure about what exactly they want to buy, the recommendation of other types of products based on the environment style will help them discover the products that they like but didn’t consider to search for at the beginning.    

My Contribution

This concept design is an individual project, but it also contains a lot of efforts from Kohl’s CX team. A research report on Kohl’s Home Affinity done by UX researchers helped me narrow down the problem space to increasing reliability perception. I also collected a lot of initial inspiring ideas from many designers, researchers and product managers by organizing a design workshop. Last but not least, continuous feedbacks and mentorship from my director, manager and mentors definitely contributed a lot to this project. 

In terms of the timeline, I spent three weeks working on this concept design and finished the first prototype by the end of the internship. Based on the constructive feedbacks I got from the team, I spent one more week in the fall semester iterating on the concept and prototyping the new concept using the technique I just learned from the Advanced Prototyping course.

Let me show you my design process...

Narrowing Down Problem Space

Kohl’s UX researchers has done a big-scale survey on Home affinity. It shows the factors of various hierarchies influencing Kohl's affinity in Home and Kohl’s performance on each factor.

I chose to focus on reliability over value because UX department doesn’t have great chance to change what Kohl's sell and the price Kohl's set. Between out-of-stock issue and low perception of variety, the former one is more like a resource problem than an experiential problem, so I narrowed down the initial problem space to:

Make customers believe Kohl's have what they want
Facilitate customers to get what they want easier

Design Workshop

In order to explore as many potential design directions as possible and make the following customer interview more effective, I organized a design workshop with designers, researchers and product managers involved. We conducted a Crazy 8 activity (coming up with eight design ideas in eight minutes), then we grouped them and had a discussion about the ideas.
Main shared themes among the ideas are personalization and findability, so I reframed the design problem as:
‍
How might we provide an efficient online browsing experience based on customers’ personalized needs in Home (department) so that they will trust kohl’s to have what they want?

Customer Journey Map

Based on the direction formed in the design workshop, I conducted six customer interviews and competitor analysis. After that, I synthesized the findings into a customer journey map.
From the customer journey map, I found the point that customers perceive the lowest variety and there is no existing effective solution for, is before customers order for continuous shopping.  

The reason became clear with comparison between the two Home shopping patterns. In relocation shopping, customers could easily find many choices of good value (price and quality), which is their overriding need. However, in continuous shopping, it’s difficult for customers to find products meeting their prioritized need, which leads to perception of low variety.

Generative Metaphor

I drew an analogy between Home customer experience and Tetris player experience to better express the problem and specify the design direction.  
SHOP FOR RELOCATION
Doing Home relocation shopping is like Tetris players trying to put something into a blank board. At this stage, many choices are acceptable.
SEARCH THE PRODUCT FOR CONTINUOUS SHOPPING
When players have already built something, it’s like continuous shopping. At this stage, players have very specific shape of area to fill in, but they might not know what the block could be like. In this case, they might try to search for shape 1 and shape 2, but forget that shape 3 could also be an ideal choice. How might we provide inspirations based on specific customer settings rather than the products they search?
LOOK FOR THE IDEAL PRODUCT FROM MANY CHOICES
In Tetris, imagine when the player has very specific need of shape, the preview of next shapes is hidden, players need to spend some time and effort to see each shape to know if it’s usable. If the ones that fit are at the very last envelopes, they will easily lose patience after opening the first several envelopes and start complaining: " the game doesn’t have the shape I want at all." This is what customers experience when they browse multiple choices finding nothing could fit their space. How might we enable customers to find items fitting their place quickly without spending much time viewing ineligible ones?  

Ideation

I generated over 10 initial concepts which could be categorized into three directions.

Leverage on user’s existing methods of referring on space. (eg. Refer on floor plans)

Let customers build their own collections which will provide source data to inspire others.

Enable customers to define a certain area in their home and recommend products based on that.

I finally decided to go with the last one because: 1) It’s the most straightforward way of filtering the size, the most important factor to consider for continuous shopping, 2) Kohl’s mobile app already have developed a feature performing very well on image identifying, which could be applied for this direction of ideas.

Initial Concept and Prototype

Therefore, I made a feature called Fit Your Place and redesigned the camera function of Kohl’s mobile app.
Originally, the camera button and scan button are separated. Camera button leads to the feature that identifies items from pictures taken by customers, although the image identification is accurate and powerful, this feature is rarely used. By contrast, the scan function is used frequently because customers always need it to apply Kohl’s coupons and Kohl’s cash.
To make both Fit Your Place feature and image identification feature better exposed to customers, I combined them with the scan function and made one entrance for all the three features.
Fit Your Place enables customers to take a photo of their home and define a certain area in the image. After they confirm the area they define, the system will only recommend products that could fit in the area.
Customers could type in some keywords to get more accurate search results. After they select a certain product, they could either preview how it looks to put the product in the area or directly click into the product detail page. The first product image will be the photo taken by the customer.  

Testing and Iteration

Based on the concept test, customers’ most familiar way of searching products is still typing something in the search bar even when they don’t have a clear image of the product they are looking for in their mind. Therefore, I added another entrance of Fit Your Place under ‘Filter & Sort’ list to make the new feature fit in current customer shopping habit better.
During the testing, few participants were able to define the area accurately at once due to the small size of the screen. At the same time, I also tried to push the concept ahead of current condition. Inspired by Measure Tool on IOS, I iterated the concept to enabling customers to define the area in the AR view, which will make the interactions of defining an area in real space much simpler and more intuitive.  

Prototyping AR Experience

To test the interactions of defining the area in AR environment quickly, I made a paper prototype using cardboard, transparent plastic paper, printing paper, tape and laser pointer and conducted five user tests. Based on the test results, I made the following iterations:
CLOSE THE SHAPE
ORIGINAL
Once the user adds the fourth point, the line connecting the first dot and the fourth dot will show up automatically and close the shape.
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ITERATION
Since test participants mentioned that the area they wanted to define might not be a quadrilateral, I decided to provide users more flexibility on when to close the shape. In the iterated design, after the user adds the third dot, they could either tap the first dot to close the shape or keep adding more dots.
ADJUST THE SHAPE
ORIGINAL
The Add button will transfer to the Drag button when the location point is close to any points that the user already added. Then the user could hold the button to drag and move the dot to adjust the shape.
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ITERATION
Very few test participants triggered the Drag function because the chance that the location point meets other dots is very low. They also felt the interaction of adjusting the shape is a bit complex. Therefore, in the iterated design, the user could drag the dots directly on the screen without holding other buttons. There will also be a prompt near each dot showing that they are movable.

Final Design

Fit Your Place is a filter embedded in Kohl’s mobile App. It enables customers to define a customized area in the real physical environment and filters out the products which could fit in this defined area. Meanwhile, the system will also inspire customers with other types of products based on the environment.



ENTRANCES

Customers could enter Fit your Place through either 'Filter & Sort' or the camera icon on the right side of the search bar.


SCAN THE ENVIRONMENT

Firstly, customers need to move their phone to scan the environment. This will allow the system to identify the flat surfaces and the overall style in the view. After the scanning is completed, the cursor for locating dots will show up.


DEFINE THE AREA

Then, customers could draw a shape on a flat surface to define an area by locating multiple dots. After they add the third dot, they could either tap the first dot to close the shape or keep adding more dots.


UNDO AND CLEAR

During the process of defining the area, customers could always undo or clear the action(s) of locating the dots.


ADJUST THE SHAPE

After customers have closed the shape, they could adjust it by dragging the dots before confirming the area.


FILTER RESULTS

After customers confirm the area, the system will show them the fitted search results. Besides, Fit Your Place will also recommend other products which could fit in the defined area and match the environment style.

Future Steps

This concept only covers the customer experience on the mobile app. If I have more time, I will try to make this feature also available on Kohls.com to provide a seamless omni-channel customer experience. To achieve this, I still need to figure out 1) interaction details of transferring from Kohls.com to the mobile app to define the area and 2) how the website reacts to the information input on the mobile app.

What I Learned

It’s super important to learn where to find help and how to take advantage of company resources.

Different from school project, I realize that in the company, there are so many approachable experts of the design space and there are many works done about this already. Taking advantage of these resources will increase working efficiency a lot. I couldn’t finish this project in only two weeks without the previous research report, design workshop and frequent touch bases with designers and researchers in our team.

Be aware of the role of design in solving a certain problem.

In the cross functional environment, various departments contribute distinct value to the same project. Being aware of the strength and weakness of design helps form the design direction. For example, in this project, I realized design can’t influence the price we set or what we sell, so I chose to focus on the change of customers’ perception.

Push the idea to the further future.

The exploration of emerging technology after my first prototype enabled me to craft a more intuitive user experience. I started to understand the value of concept design to a company. We can’t just wait until a certain resource (like technology) becomes available and then start to design for it. The concept could even shape what resources the company would purchase or develop in the future.

Acknowledgement

Heartfelt thanks to Kohl’s Customer Experience Team for mentoring me and supporting me throughout this project and the whole internship. Especially many thanks to my director Mark Felcansmith, my manager Marcus Hamilton and my coaches Rodney Negosa and Tanmay Mhatre. Also, I want to thank Rishabh Bhardwaj, Andrew Retana, AK Leung, David Strybel and Xinyuan Li for participating in my workshop and providing many valuable inspirations.