Trend Tagger

My role | User experience research & design (in team of 5)

Skills | Service blueprint, Storyboarding, Speed dating, Prototyping (digital & physical), User enactment

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Problem Space

AEO owns a large share in clothing market across the country. They are maintaining an overall positive relationship with their customers, but there are still unmet needs that await addressing…

Clients:

“We want to show the versatility of our clothes.”

“We’re famous for jeans, but we also want our customers to know that we offer far more than that.”

“How to create a seamless omni-channel shopping experience?”

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Mission Statement

How might we bridge AEO’s multi-channel offerings in order to optimize customer’s shopping experience and increase the retailer’s wallet share and customer loyalty.

The Trend Tagger program invites AEO customers to style upcoming, on-trend items with other American Eagle merchandise through the website and the mobile app. Customer stylists receive points in AE’s existing loyalty program by submitting their outfits for community voting, and the three customers who receive the most votes win the styled merchandise and AEO Connected points as a reward.

Understanding The Problem

After a kick-off meeting with our clients, we set up a design scope to dive into optimizing in-store shopping experience.

With such scope in mind, we did primary research, including contextual observation and interview, literature review, stakeholder mapping, user experience modeling, to better understand the current problems.

Contextual Observation

By observing customer shopping behavior and talking to in-store shoppers and associates, we had a clearer understanding of their relationships and the in-store shopping trajectory.

Stakeholder Map

Human-centered design begins from humans. By making a stakeholder map, we were able to understand who are the humans-of-interest. The interconnections between individual stakeholders and the grouping of related entities showed us a network of the people we care about (and who care about our work).

User Experience Map

Since shoppers are our primary users, we drew an experience map from the perspective of an average in-store shopper to see all the possible interactions and how they are connected.

Service Blueprint

Service blueprint is one of the major models that drove our whole design process. It is a methodology that helps break down different channels in the service system including physical evidence, customer/staff actions, and support process. In this way, we were not only able to discover major breakdowns in customer journeys but can also troubleshoot the problems with longitudinal mappings into backstage processes.

Competitive Analysis

Together with field studies, we were also doing literature review and competitive analysis regarding shopping experience. We chose some major competitors according to target customer demographic and market shares.

At this phase, we not only want to focus on in-store experience but were also interested in a broader range of offerings including online/mobile app availability, social media exposure and influencer support. We want to see how other retailers optimize customer experience with multiple channels.

Understanding The Users

During the primary research space, we were able to uncover some potential design opportunities. But we still need to get direct access to our target users to understand their feelings, challenges and unmet needs. In the secondary research phase, we conducted online survey and interviews to depict a portrait for the users.

Online Survey

We were able to collect over a hundred survey responses. We stratify the respondents according to their age group and targeted on 15-24 year old young shoppers.