Shop Like a Breeze

finding what you love, finding you

Find in Store is a service that brings you the best items in the store with the most engagement. Stefanie, Kotoko, Inhae, and Kaitlyn worked with the user experience team at Nordstrom to create a new in-store shopping experience. Take a look!

We chose to name the new service 'Find in Store' in order to match with the current Nordstrom branding.
This is a undergraduate senior capstone that won Best in Show in 2019.

Looking for the perfect item in a store is hard because you never knew if you fully explored all your options

Think about the last time you went shopping in a large department store, it is easy to get lost track of time AND all the items in there!

“Nordstrom [organizes] it by brand. When I am shopping for a specific item, I have to walk the entire floor… it took a long time to figure out where the items are.”             --- 29-year old project manager

You might find what you are looking for. A lot of times you don’t have much confidence. You would never found out that perfect item for you has been laying in there waiting for you!

is here to help you!

the mechanism

bring the features for e-commerce into the physical stores

We asked shoppers their biggest regrets for both in-store shopping and online shopping.

To our surprise, the miss of human interaction and the touch of the fabric has won along with browsing and narrowing down all the options available at a glance online.

Finding the design requirements

We recruited Nordstrom shoppers who allowed us to shop along with them to take notes of their in-store shopping habits and conduct short interviews after. The shop along method was instructed by the user researcher @ Nordstrom, Sheila Paschall.

We then used Affinity Diagramming to organize our thoughts and notes from the shop-along sessions.

Meeting our personas

From our list of design requirements, we agreed that having two personas would be more relatable when we think about the problem and sketching out our solutions.

Skye, Persona
Aria, Persona

Agreeing to the best solution

With personas in mind, we challenged ourselves to sketch 12 ideas each, a total of 48 ideas. Then, we got together and presented our solutions and voted for the best tangible must-haves given the constraints. However, after rounds of debating and discussing, we cannot agree to one.

To agree, we took all the must-have features and started another round of brainstorming and sketching. The exercise continued for two more rounds until we felt comfortable to proceed with one experience design.
(annnd, that ‘one’ experience got revisioned another eight times)

The New In-store Shopping Experience

Kiosk

Mobile

Paper

The Find in Store service @ Nordstrom aims to help those who are shopping with a solid requirement such as a price range, a color demand and/or a certain brand.

Your experience includes:
1. Enter the store
2. Interact with the welcome kiosk to filter down your best options in the store
3. Receive the location of the interested items on your Nordstrom app or;
4. Print out a paper copy with a store map so you can quickly locate those options and never miss one potential choice!

There, we saved your headache and also found your most confident option in the store if you are a shopper who doesn't like to browse often.

 Interaction

 Interaction

Meet the team

Inhae Kim

Visual Design
Video Production
Evaluation PM

Kotoko Yamada

Interaction Design
Poster Design
Ideation PM

Kaitlyn He (Me)

Interaction Design
User Research
Research PM

Stefanie Choi

Visual Design
Presentation Design
Implementation PM

Meet the Nordstrom sponsors/mentors

Left - right: Sheila Paschella (current user researcher @ expedia); Kristin Gannon (Sr. UX Designer);
Lady in the pink top: Sarah Carne (current product designer @ Facebook)
Lady with the green necklace: Ashley (Zammitt) Costanzo (Lead UX Designer)

Reflection

I am proud of my team, and it was good to know that we have each other's back and that we are all super passionate about the project. During the half of year working with one another, we learned how to express our critical opinions as well as picking up the work that needed to be done. I felt like I can be brutally honest with my teammates because we all know we are working towards one goal-- to showcase the best of our abilities before we graduate. We loved the project so much that neither of us mind spending extra time on the projects. I also learned that each of us have our strength in different ways and if we didn't have each other, we couldn't have done such an excellent job. The award means everything that we worked hard towards have pay back.

I also cannot forgot how much help our mentors from Nordstrom and professors and TAs who helped us along the way. It was something really special to us working with industry professionals and humbling ourselves to learn from them. It was not only a project but a great episode memories that we got to hold onto.