Target In-Store Gift Registry
The Story
Target needed a simple interface for guests to create their registries in-store using iPad kiosks and then shop with scanner-equipped iPods to add registry items.
They had recently rolled out a new design for the scanning interface, but found that only 42% of the products being scanned in store actually made it onto customers’ registries. The team had a hunch this was because that first design was overcrowded with features, extra confirmations, and choices that created friction to getting scanned items added.
Hypothesis: If we can simplify the process and remove friction from adding items, we will increase the item scan-to-add percentage because we have minimized the obstacles currently preventing items from being added.
My Role
I collaborated with a team of 2 other UX designers to create wireframes and flows for the scanning and kiosk interfaces.
An exercise in less-is-more, we worked hard to distill the experience down to its essentials to propel and accentuate, not slow or distract from, Target's guests' shopping experience.
We burned through lots of wireframe iterations and annotations, lots of whiteboarding, lots of interdisciplinary teamwork, and a few quick-and-dirty paper prototype usability tests to help us solidify interaction ideas.
Wireframes and Annotations
I collaborated with two other experience designers, three visual designers, and a copywriter to help create and define the experience in wireframes and annotations. In the below document, I was ultimately responsible for wireframing and annotating the scanning, “my items,” and ideas sections.
Visual Design
We worked closely with our visual design team to develop and refine our user experience ideas, and then as we moved past wireframes into visual comps, collaborate further on pushing the interaction design while ensuring the UI thinking and consistency was carried through.
Afterword
We met our hypothesis objective and increased scan-to-add conversions from 42% in the previous experience to 92% in the new one!
One thing that’s kind of crazy to me is that we never usability tested the experience in-store with customers before final release. We were able to test out our app design on devices lent to us by the client in our office, which we used extensively, and stakeholders tried the experience in store themselves to troubleshoot and QA before rollout, but I would have loved to see how our customers interacted with the experience.
This work won the 2013 Sapient Rhino Award for excellence.