Rosenverse
Bridging Physical and Digital Spaces: Approaches to Retail Service Design

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

Bridging Physical and Digital Spaces: Approaches to Retail Service Design

Thursday, March 18, 2021 • Enterprise Community
Share the love for this talk
Bridging Physical and Digital Spaces: Approaches to Retail Service Design
Speakers: Catherine Dubut
Link:

Summary

Retail presents a uniquely exciting environment in which to discover service design journeys at the intersection of physical and digital spaces. What role can store employees play in the development of new technological processes? How can we engage with this environment and its people in a meaningful, impactful way? In this community videoconference, we cover approaches from a UX research and strategy lens with REI as a case study, and reflect on the challenges faced in this space.

Key Insights

  • •

    Successfully prototyping PCI-compliant in-store devices requires creative partnerships with infrastructure teams to deploy controlled test builds in real store environments.

  • •

    Physical paper prototypes can effectively simulate digital interactions to test complex service journeys in situ, revealing pain points impossible to spot in lab-only testing.

  • •

    Employees who are also customers and outdoor enthusiasts bring valuable expertise that should be treated as a core asset and voice in design decisions.

  • •

    Cross-disciplinary collaboration, including unexpected contributors like QA testers with store experience, can surface breakthrough ideas and solutions.

  • •

    Building accessible, inclusive internal repositories for sharing research insights fosters widespread organizational learning across siloed teams.

  • •

    Storytelling with real user faces, names, and videos strengthens empathy and connection between design teams and end users, especially across distributed organizations.

  • •

    Enterprise constraints—like store layout variability, staff scheduling, and internal politics—compel adaptive, flexible designs tailored to different contexts.

  • •

    Reframing retail employees as partners rather than mere users dramatically improves engagement and feedback quality.

  • •

    Balancing design innovation with business goals and organizational bureaucracy is challenging but can succeed through transparent communication and strategic storytelling.

  • •

    Enhanced employee adoption (126% increase) of the Mobile Selling Assistant demonstrates the impact of human-centered, iterative design despite limited resources.

Notable Quotes

"The store mobile device is the indispensable silent partner enabling store employees to balance task productivity and customer engagement."

"We could impact the end-to-end customer service and customer experience through our most underutilized asset: our store employees."

"No one really knows what to expect anyway, so failure goes largely unnoticed. It's better to be transparent about the mess."

"Every person on your team matters. Find actionable ways to include and share findings with anyone who will listen."

"Physical prototyping is a tool to explore interaction modalities and physically connected environments beyond all things digital."

"It almost feels like cheating because your users are showing and telling you what they need. It's almost too easy."

"Being able to see faces and first names of people we're learning from makes those users tangible to the team."

"The constraints in enterprise pushed us to focus more on an employee-centered approach for product decisions."

"In large organizations, soft skills are the hard skills—it's all about how you connect with humans and express your core values."

"We created a simple WordPress site so all corners of the business could contribute and share insights, breaking down silos."

Ask the Rosenbot
Kavana Ramesh
Meaningful inclusion: Practicing accessibility research with confidence
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Sarah Sgarlato Pierini
From Passion to Execution: A Story of Evolving Research Maturity at LinkedIn
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Peter Merholz
Customer-Centered Design Organizations
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Jacqui Frey
Scale is Social Work
2020 • DesignOps Community
Corey Long
Hiring in DesignOps: A Critical Study on How to Hire and Get Hired
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi
Contextuality problem: Exploring the Benefits of Qualitative and Quantitative Research
2023 • QuantQual Interest Group
Prabhas Pokharel
Order and Chaos: New Ways of Collaborating on Synthesis and Storytelling
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Shahrzad Samadzadeh
What Is My Value? Two Takes and Some Mistakes
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Amy Parness
Scaling Sustainability: Complementary strategies that drive long-term success
2025 • Climate UX Interest Group
Rebecca Topps
Planning and conducting remote usability studies for accessibility
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Sahibzada Mayed
Cultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and Collaboration
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Doug Powell
DesignOps and the Next Frontier: Leading Through Unpredictable Change
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Catherine Courage
The Enterprise UX Journey: Lessons From the Voyage & The Opportunity Ahead
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Sam Proulx
Prototype Reviews, People With Disabilities, and You
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Dalia El-Shimy
So You've Got a Seat at the Table. Now What?
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Sam Proulx
Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold

More Videos

Marc Fonteijn

"Half of the service design professionals do not feel connected to their peers, which is significant."

Marc Fonteijn Ru Butler

Increase your confidence, influence, and impact (through a Professional Community)

December 3, 2024

Dem Gerolemou

"Trust is something to build and maintain, not a box to check or a one-time achievement."

Dem Gerolemou Alexis Oh Neef Rehman

Climate technology fundamentals

May 15, 2024

Daniela Magaña Flores

"We use a holistic methodological approach combining explicit and implicit quantitative methods to fully get the user's perspective."

Daniela Magaña Flores Ariane Rahn Jeff Ephraim Bander

Ahead of Competition: Learn What UX Benchmarking Can Do for Your Business Today

March 10, 2022

Abbey Smalley

"To influence others, you must be willing to be influenced and change your mind to align with organizational goals."

Abbey Smalley Sylas Souza

Scaling UX Past the Size of Your Team

January 8, 2024

Patrick Commarford

"The two variables that stood out were how many people the project impacts and how often they use it."

Patrick Commarford

Design Staffing for Impact

January 8, 2024

Xenia Adjoubei

"We believe in global citizenship and de-westernizing research by including community members in the discourse and insight decisions."

Xenia Adjoubei Sean Bruce

Empowering Communities Through the Researcher in Residence Program

March 29, 2023

Craig Villamor

"If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product."

Craig Villamor

Design Systems for Ethical Design

January 26, 2023

Jon Fukuda

"We don’t need a north star, we need a constellation that allows us to see the full picture."

Jon Fukuda Ellie Krysl

Design Planning and Management Support

October 3, 2023

Iain McMaster

"Designers tend to work behind closed doors because the design process is messy and chaotic, and they don’t want people to see that."

Iain McMaster IHan Cheng

Design and Product: from Frenemy to Harmony

November 29, 2023