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Bridging Physical and Digital Spaces: Approaches to Retail Service Design
Summary
Retail presents a uniquely exciting environment in which to discover service design journeys at the intersection of physical and digital spaces. What role can store employees play in the development of new technological processes? How can we engage with this environment and its people in a meaningful, impactful way? In this community videoconference, we cover approaches from a UX research and strategy lens with REI as a case study, and reflect on the challenges faced in this space.
Key Insights
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Successfully prototyping PCI-compliant in-store devices requires creative partnerships with infrastructure teams to deploy controlled test builds in real store environments.
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Physical paper prototypes can effectively simulate digital interactions to test complex service journeys in situ, revealing pain points impossible to spot in lab-only testing.
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Employees who are also customers and outdoor enthusiasts bring valuable expertise that should be treated as a core asset and voice in design decisions.
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Cross-disciplinary collaboration, including unexpected contributors like QA testers with store experience, can surface breakthrough ideas and solutions.
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Building accessible, inclusive internal repositories for sharing research insights fosters widespread organizational learning across siloed teams.
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Storytelling with real user faces, names, and videos strengthens empathy and connection between design teams and end users, especially across distributed organizations.
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Enterprise constraints—like store layout variability, staff scheduling, and internal politics—compel adaptive, flexible designs tailored to different contexts.
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Reframing retail employees as partners rather than mere users dramatically improves engagement and feedback quality.
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Balancing design innovation with business goals and organizational bureaucracy is challenging but can succeed through transparent communication and strategic storytelling.
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Enhanced employee adoption (126% increase) of the Mobile Selling Assistant demonstrates the impact of human-centered, iterative design despite limited resources.
Notable Quotes
"The store mobile device is the indispensable silent partner enabling store employees to balance task productivity and customer engagement."
"We could impact the end-to-end customer service and customer experience through our most underutilized asset: our store employees."
"No one really knows what to expect anyway, so failure goes largely unnoticed. It's better to be transparent about the mess."
"Every person on your team matters. Find actionable ways to include and share findings with anyone who will listen."
"Physical prototyping is a tool to explore interaction modalities and physically connected environments beyond all things digital."
"It almost feels like cheating because your users are showing and telling you what they need. It's almost too easy."
"Being able to see faces and first names of people we're learning from makes those users tangible to the team."
"The constraints in enterprise pushed us to focus more on an employee-centered approach for product decisions."
"In large organizations, soft skills are the hard skills—it's all about how you connect with humans and express your core values."
"We created a simple WordPress site so all corners of the business could contribute and share insights, breaking down silos."
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