Retail is changing continuously to become more experiential in order to evoke the feeling and benefits a customer would have when owning a product. As a leader in this space, the Retail Marketing team at Google has launched a Retail Popup store, with a primary focus on experience, every year for three years now.

The goal for these Popup stores has been to allow customers to step into what their world would look like if it was fueled by the impressive hardware product lineup, including the Pixel, Pixelbook, Nest Hub, Google Home and more, which are all powered by the Google Assistant.

My challenge as the team's Customer Experience and Service Designer was to tie in the product experiences to the path to purchase, as well as ensure a seamless and smooth holistic, end-to-end experience throughout the Popup store narrative.

In order to address the challenge of creating a cohesive in-store experience that ties in the narratives of all the diverse product experiences, my team and I designed multiple design thinking workshops throughout the year leading up to the launch of the Popup. Since this behemoth of a project that was the launch of the Popup naturally included many different groups of people, such as third party staffing and creative agencies, it was clear to us as CX and Service designers that utilizing journey maps and service blueprints as tools in our workshops would be essential.

First set of workshops

• Goal: Diagnose what worked and what didn't in Popups from previous years
• Tools & Methods:
  • Customer profiles
  • Employee interviews
  • Empathy mapping
  • Journey mapping
  • Priority voting
  • Affinity mapping
  • Insight statements
• Insights:
  1. Discovered that the lack of customer support in past years' Popup stores was a big pain point for customers AND for employees, since they weren't prepared nor trained on these support issues when they came up
  2. The path to purchase was often clogged by long cues and the product experiences felt fragmented

Second set of workshops

• Goal: Design what the ideal, future Popups should look like
• Tools & Methods:
  • Brainstorm using How-Might-We statements
  • Prioritize ideas using matrix
  • Create service blueprints for those ideas
  • Draft business briefs for top ideas
• Insights:
  1. Implement more Grab'n'Go options for purchases in order to alleviate some of the long cue formations found to be customer pain points
  2. Train Popup store agents on the top customer support issues from previous years so they could provide more helpful care to customers
  3. Create a theme and narrative that carries throughout all product experiences, tying them together

Third set of workshops

• Goal: Ensure the end-to-end customer experience and internal operations flow seamlessly and cohesively
• Tools & Methods:
  • Walk through a tape-down with dimensions of the physical space
  • Address remaining open questions
  • Role-play customer needs to pressure test experience
• Insights:
  1. More mobile POS would be needed to support an efficient path to purchase
  2. My team and I should equip these cross-functional teams with a "workshop in a box" so they could run through these exercises on their own again how many times was necessary until launch