Best Buy – Home App

Improving Geek Squad discovery and retention for Best Buy

The Best Buy Home App allows users to easily get 24/7 service help for their tech, but awareness of our support services are low. By removing ambiguous entry point barriers in our app, we saw an increase awareness of our services and retention of customers using our services.

+8%

increase in appointments booked from Home App

-60%

decrease in negative comments on Opinion Lab relating to not being able to schedule an in-store appointment

Role
Domain
Responsibilities
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‍
‍
Date

Design Intern
Home & Support
Discovery, Task Flows, Research, Personas, Journey Mapping, UX Validation, Execution
2019

"“All I want to do is schedule a pickup appointment and I can't figure out how to do so! Please make it easier!!!”"

— Anonymous opinionlab comment

Project Background

Feedback from customers show discoverability of appointments is a problem

The extensive amount of OpinionLab feedback and App Store reviews shows that scheduling an appointment for (repair, pickup, service, or installation) is a huge issue. These are the statistics:
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• 64% of OpinionLab feedback between April 2018-2019 were negative
• 9% of the negative reviews pertained to scheduling an appointment
• A high amount of negative app store reviews (verified)
• App uninstalls (unverified)

Currently, the main access to the support flow is discovered by entering one of the four categories or the "see all categories". We were not clear where customers were having trouble discovering support, especially with the "What can we help you with?" text accompanying the category icons.

Research

Employees in the store are directing customers to schedule appointments through our app

In-store interviews from Best Buy employee's at the Northgate location and OpinionLab/App feedback helped me form a first-time user journey map. Since users have touch-points beyond our app, it is important to understand the context of when users download the app and how in-store Best Buy store employees are advertising the app.

There are implications to surfacing a appointment button directly to customers

Implications behind this solution will cause a costly new business problem. Implementing an appointment button would encourage users to schedule in-store appointments for easy-fix problems that could be solved by other fulfillment methods we offer such as our live chat. do-it-yourself, and call service options. In-store appointments are the most time-consuming and costly fulfillment method.

I worked with researchers to observe users’ natural path in downloading and navigating our Home app

I designed three task-based scenarios for both known and unknown fulfillment methods using an unmoderated remote usability test (usertesting.com) and divided participants into two groups to see differences in expectations.

There were clear signs of confusion when onboarding into our Home app

The usability study allowed me to observe half of the users finding support through the product first and the other half through the support page. Continuing to leverage these two entry points is important to serve different user mental models.

However, after onboarding, first-time users were sent directly to the products page. When there were no products associated with the account, users were confused about whether they had to register their items in order to schedule an appointment for it. When users can’t find what they’re looking for on the ‘My Products’ tab, they resort to the hamburger menu next

Hypothesis

How might we create an experience that allows users to receive support regardless of whether or not they know their fulfillment method?

Design

There's 3 quick wins

1. Changing the support icon on the navigation bar. The usability study highlighted many users overlooking the support tab, which was the quickest way to receive support. When first-time users landed on an empty products page, they tried to add their product, look within the hamburger menu, or tap around the search, filter, sort menu.

2. Redirect first-time users to the support page after onboarding if they have no products associated with their account. After completing the onboarding flows, users struggled immensely with discovering support when they had no products associated with their Best Buy account. In order to solve this, we can direct them directly to the support page, which would be more useful for first-time users.

3. Remove the search, filter, sort menu when users have no products. If users have no products on their products page, there is no use for this feature. Some users were tapping on this menu when there were no products to search, filter, or sort from.

The current support icon is unintuitive

The old icon was a question mark which many users thought was a frequently asked questions page. Many users overlooked this tab when trying to find the support flow.

Home app - navigation tab (2019)

I worked with the Design Systems team to guide my designs for the new support icon. I wanted the support to represent a Best Buy agent. My assumption was that it will seem intuitive for Best Buy customers to associate the agents with support. I tried out creating blue shirt icons but realized that it was not accurate. I moved onto designing a Geek Squad agent (known for their tie aesthetic) to keep it on-brand.

From previous studies, I knew that Best Buy customers, and especially TTS (total tech support) members love the Geek Squad, so any place where we can insert that brand would be beneficial for users to recognize that area is for receiving support.

Validating the new support icon

In order to prove that an icon change will improve the discoverability of the support page, I ran a one-click test. I asked 100 users where they would click first in order to begin finding support to fix their recently broken iPhone screen at their nearest Best Buy store. The results showed a 127% increase in discoverability just by changing the icon.

Final icon

We'll redirect new users to the support tab rather than the products tab

My next step was to create a new flow so that first-time users with no products associated with their account will land into the support page instead of the products page. For this, I created a new user flow so that my PM and Developers on my team will understand when this change would occur.

To prevent confusion, we'll hide the search, filter, sort menu in the empty state

The one-click results that were shown earlier also showed that 16% of users were clicking on the search, filter, sort menu on the products page. This reinforces the results I observed fro the usability study I conducted very early on. By removing this feature, we will eliminate the probability that users will tap there to find support because it is not useful during this empty state.