Service Design Field Research
Well before the pandemic, the client — a national warehouse club retail chain — piloted a service in which customers could order and pay for most goods ahead of time via app or website, drive to a designated pick up area outside the store, and have the merchandise brought to their cars in order to reduce hassle and speed up the shopping process. Customers weren't adopting this service as frequently as the retailer had anticipated. Additionally, the retailer had implemented two variations in how they deliver the service. Not only was the retailer interested in knowing why adoption rates were low, but it was also how they could improve the service overall, and which variation tested better.
While there were a few nationwide pilots at the time, Tulsa, Oklahoma was home to both configurations the wholesaler had designed and wanted to test — one with a canopy over the pickup area (Configuration 1) and one without (Configuration 2). Naturally, the two stores in this city were a logical choice to compare efficacy between the two configurations in an efficient way.
Project Objective
Increase a national US wholesale club’s market share and competitiveness by improving curbside pickup service design
My Role
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User Research Lead ​
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Research Operations Lead ​
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Stakeholder Management
Methods & Tactics
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Field Research ​​
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Contextual Inquiry ​​
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Usability Test ​​
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User Journeys
Key User Profiles
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Members willing to test out a curbside pickup service and mobile app for the first time
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Store associates who staff and manage curbside pickup
Research Approach
The specific research questions we were seeking to answer were:
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What is the awareness and physical discoverability of this service?
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Does the presence of a canopy impact usability, awareness, or satisfaction?
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What are members’ expectations for curbside pickup?
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What is the associate’s experience when staffing the service?
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How can this service be improved?
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Is the service useful?
To tackle these questions, I performed contextual inquiries and usability tests consisting of the following steps and tactics:​
​Associate
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Observe process of picking, checking in, and storing different purchased products for orders where product items had a range of storage requirements, from bulky to frozen
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Observe process of order delivery
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Ask probing questions wherever necessary
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​Customer (First Curbside Pickup Use)​
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Meet at a designated location in the store parking lot out of view of the pickup area for set up and background questions
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Drive together to locate the pickup area
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Identify the need to call a phone number upon arrival
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Call the phone number
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Order delivery and loading
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Transaction signoff
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Probing questions during process around usability, state of mind, perception of value, as well as the perception of time elapsed
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Measuring time to completion of transaction steps
Ideally, I would have observed customers ordering items as well, but due to fixed scope, needed to focus only on the act of pickup.​
Findings Summary
Customer
Participants were able to complete tasks at a higher frequency when provided a dedicated canopy over the curbside pickup area than in the location without this variable.
I observed the following issues that interfered with the ability to successfully complete pick up at both locations:
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Lack of clear, store-specific instructions on receipts, confirmation screens, and / or confirmation emails
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Lack of advertising within the store to create awareness
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Lack of clear signage in the store parking lot
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Misleading signage in the store parking lot
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Structures around the store building that appeared to be pickup areas – parking lots are often shared with other businesses
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Lack of phones / intercoms / or kiosks in pickup areas
Associate
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Associates did their best to make do with the tools they were handed to provide excellent customer service, however, the following hampered their ability to do so:
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Lack of clarity around what had been paid for and what had not on fulfillment forms and order confirmations
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Lack of space to store pickup orders led to errors and delays
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Large distance between pickup staging area and pickup waiting area added to task time
What I enjoyed about this project
This project posed an interesting problem space at the intersection of digital and physical in a very complex service design. It involved teasing through legacy business intelligence systems, multiple stakeholders, in-store logistics and planning workflows, mobile and web interfaces, as well as physical design of internal and external fixtures distributed over a many-acre landscape in at times poor-visibility conditions. ​
​​Installing a mobile usability lab in participants’ personal vehicles and gaining the trust of store employees suspicious of a curious consultant sent by HQ posed additional exciting challenges. I also had the opportunity to manage a consulting engagement with a client team on the ground with me. While this adds to performance anxiety in the short term, I have found over the years that bringing your team along in the triumphs and travails of the journey is the most rewarding and impactful way to conduct effective research.
I learned to appreciate the true meaning of "fire weather" and how increasingly common environmental effects can impact the user experience. A prairie fire likely caused by a spark from a train wheel led to very smoky conditions during the last few days of field research. See the image in this section for how hazy conditions impacted visibility. While this was and continues to be a hazard for populations in Tulsa and across the globe, its occurrence was timely for a true human factors assessment of this service design.
