The challenge is to proceed to find an opportunity, without a predefined problem statement. The service proposition should have a component of in-store experience and the value it can bring to DSG.

In order to discover the unmet needs in current services and opportunities, we have come up with the plan as follows:

• Research current product service ecosystem of Dick's Sporting Goods
• In-Store experiential research with contextual inquiries and interviewing teammates
• Define personas and map journeys
• Map service blueprint
• Generate insights based on personas and observe opportunities
• Scope the focus area and generate a hypothesis
• Service Proposition
• Critique and feedback
• Refined proposition
• Prototyping and testing
• High fidelity mockups, poster and video for pitching
• Final Pitch

With the research notes, customer journeys and service blueprint documented, we have proceeded to map an affinity diagram with notes from all the observations in research to derive insights that can help us in narrowing down focus areas in customer journey and service blueprint.

• Employee-only designated tasks does not provide enough opportunities for customer co-creation.
  Employees have to constantly visit back store to check warranties, similar products or different size of a product which leaves less time for employee-customer interaction.
• There is inconsistency in employee skills between stores.
  Different ambassadors have different levels of expertise in different stores. Good training, but few experts in smaller stores.
• Instore products are categorized based on brand or purpose, yet customers need help locating products.
  Employees have to delegate their time to help the customers find the products. Customers rely on employee knowledge when finding a pair of shoes for a specific sports.
• Inconsistency between online/in store product information.
  Customers also face challenge with the availability of product within the store, even though it sometimes shows available on website. (Guerrilla Research)
• Customers value employee interaction and knowledge, but employees are not always available.
  
  • Employees have to delegate their time between behind-the-scenes responsibilities and customer service.
  • Customers will come back to the store just to see their favorite employee.
  • Customers rely on employee knowledge when starting a new sport
• Some customers do not trust that employees have enough knowledge about specific sport/training.
  Customers are self-reliant and prefer to spend some time comparing products themselves.
• Lack of engagement, stimulation, and entertainment for children in the store.
  Through observation, we noticed that children with families and parents/guardians wandered around and looked bored. The only “entertainment” seemed to be the foosball table and a section with sports balls. This directly contrasts with the adults we spoke to, who had fond memories as children of playing in Dick’s while their parents shopped.
• Customers have a long-term relationship with Dick’s (20+ years) and associate the store with fond childhood memories.
  Through Guerrilla research, we saw a pattern of customers who had been aware of or shopped at Dick’s since a young age
  • Woman remembered running around the track while parents shopped
  • Used to “wander inside” when Dick’s was in malls
• The post-shopping experience is cumbersome for employees.
  Many processes, like returning and equipment services, are manual for employees. Some customers prefer to order online and return in-store because it’s easier than shipping.
• Customers value immersive shopping experience, but in-store trials are not available for every sport.
  In-store trial arenas such as mini golf park are available for limited sports. There are not enough ways for employees to get feedback about their work quickly.

The research shows an opportunity to create value for Dick’s Sporting Goods and their athletes by connecting teammates across stores and displaying product information.

Allow athletes to talk with teammates and view product information in-store through an interactive assistant that connects teammates within a certain mile radius.

With our initial proposition we have pitched it to stakeholders at DSG to get a validation and reflect ourselves throughout the process so far. Interactions with teammates are considered high value and it is risky to drive more athleted towards high value interactions

We need to understand high-value interaction further and encourage athletes to have more domain-specific conversations with teammates. We need to also scope down our target athletes.

We want to:

Explore value in an interaction from both the athlete and teammates’ perspective

Find middle ground between a totally virtual experience and the in-person experience

Divide our design/solution into multiple parts to manage the scope

Our new How Might We’s:

HMW establish teammate credibility within athletes

HMW encourage athletes to visit in store

HMW create more opportunities for high-value interaction between teammates and athletes

To answer these, we have visited the store again and performed contextual inquiries with the teammates to understand the time spent in high value and low value interactions. Based on the new insights we formed a new hypothesis on the service.

The research shows an opportunity to create value for Dick’s Sporting Goods and their athletes by turning low-value interactions into high-value interactions through an in-store notification feature in the mobile app.

Improve in-store experience using DSG's new in-store mode to notify personalised recommendations, self serve athletes with product information and encourage to have conversations with teammate if an expert help is required.

With the pivoted idea, we are able to empower customers to self-serve product information and motivate them to start valuable conversations with teammates. This idea also taps into Dick’s current system.

We have brainstormed rapidly what are all the possible high value conversations and low value converstations that can be addressed with the service in different scenarios.

Based on the scenarios, we empathized with the users and mapped all the possible user flows in the store and mapped it out, to observe the painpoints and opporuntities associated with these journeys.

The typical customer journey can be broken down in 6 steps - from looking for deals to comparing similar products and at every step customer looks up to a teammate for an answer. But with this service, customers are our new co creators- they can handle 5/6 tasks on their own, allowing the teammate to focus on the customers that need expert guidance. According to the concepts studied in service design, the service will be Dematerializing the current customer journey and Rebundle for self-sufficiency.

After receiving client feedback and refining our proposition, our next steps were to prototype and test the idea. Based on the customer journey, we came up with the following screens:
1. A lock screen where we push customers welcome notifications and check-in notifications
2. A map interface with personalized recommendations
3. A detail page with basic information about product, and meanwhile get recommendations for teammates with expertise.
4. Search result to display product location
5. Route page to provide navigation
6. Scan page

We created a paper prototype of our solution and recruited 6 participants of various backgrounds. Three participants were current DSG customers and three were not. To conduct the test, we turned the MHCI lab into a pseudo-sporting goods store by hanging product pictures on the walls.

We wanted to answer the following questions:
1. Will users have a positive or negative reaction to in-store notifications?
2. Will users feel comfortable with DSG accessing their location?
3. Will our solution encourage high-value conversations?

We instructed the participants to think-aloud while using the paper prototype phone as we manually sent them notifications and updated their screens. Participants were told to find out more information on running shoes before purchasing them. Within our team, we delegated the following roles: test runner, note taker, screen-changer, teammate. We followed testing with a short interview. After running the tests, we debriefed to share results and discuss next steps.

Content of Notification plays a key role- During the testing we realised that customer are more prone to opening a notification if it is personalized to them.

Instead of simple welcome message, It could be about latest deals/offers in the store.

It could also be about discounts on similar products based on purchase history.

Addressing low quality interaction using self serve- Our majority users were happy with the product details they were shown post product scan. These details includes product availability, variants, color and Aisle number.

Use of store layout map- This feature turned out to be very useful for the users. Although the route to specific section could be displayed better.

Section based Notifications- Users preferred notifications about the products from their abandoned shopping cart at specific sections.

Talk to Expert- Users only reached out to Teammates/Experts when they wanted to try out a product or had specific questions about the product.

Privacy concern- At first , a lot of users were not very comfortable with sharing their location information with DSG. But once they started getting more personalized information at various sections, they felt it saves their time.

One way to to address this concern could be to put a face behind these notifications

Reviews- Users were also interested to explore online reviews for each product. We an add this information in our product page in the app.