Appointment Booking

Brick and mortar is becoming a place customers expect to have immersive experiences only possible in physical space. Nordstrom’s competitive advantage is its people, but does little to surface relevant in-store experiences, like styling or alterations, online. Reimagining appointment booking was one of the ways we could better support an evolving customer journey.

My Role

UX Strategist

On the heels of integrating with a new appointment booking vendor, I led the process of creating an appointment booking strategy from early research, to brainstorming, to feature prioritization. I partnered closely with UX Research, Product and Program throughout the process and involved stakeholders across the business as needed. My Deliverable was a prioritized list of features that informed the appointment booking roadmap for the following year.

Note: I’m unable to show concrete examples due to confidentiality.

Setting context

Competitive analysis

My UX Research partner and I jointly conducted a competitive analysis of appointment booking experiences across 17 retailers. We evaluated how easy or difficult it was to find and use their appointment booking experience based on a common user scenario.

Sample of competitor alterations experiences on MOW (Uniqulo, Lululemon, Levi’s, Bloomingdales, Neiman Marcus, and Bonobos)

Findings: Mostly, retailers refer to in-store services on static marketing pages or in an FAQ, but rarely in context of the shopping journey or with an easy way to book an appointment. There was a clear opportunity for Nordstrom to stand out by surfacing an easy-to-use appointment booking experience when and where relevant for customers.

Uncovering Needs

User interviews

I collaborated with my UX Research partner on the study plan, recruiting criteria, questions, and reporting. We conducted phone interviews with 17 customers who have had a styling or alterations appointment at Nordstrom. The goal of the interviews was to discover unmet needs, so we asked about each customer’s experience before, during, and after their past appointment.

Research Findings: Many simply didn’t know Nordstrom offered online appointment booking. Some needed more information before they could commit to booking online, and others found the process for booking multiple appointments was extremely manual. The research validated that we had a lot of opportunity in the appointment booking space, and helped shape our program vision for offering a best-in-class experience.

How might we…

Brainstorm around themes

I categorized the research data into six themes, then translated the themes into “How might we…” (HMW) statements. The HMW statements helped focus group brainstorming sessions on what will make the most positive impact for customers.

Example: “Customers want to book multiple services at one time or one service multiple times,” translated to “How might we make it easy for customers to book and keep track of multiple appointments at once?”

I facilitated three brainstorming with stakeholders focused on styling, alterations, and the Manhattan market (Nordstrom will open a flagship store there in 2019 and we want to serve that demographic’s unique needs). In each session, everyone independently sketched ideas for each HMW statement, then we discussed where our ideas overlapped out could be built upon.

Evaluating ideas

Mapping & prioritizing

Next, I led a handful of working sessions with my Product and Program partners to assign customer and business value to each idea. Business value was evaluated based on what would drive long term customer engagement. Customer value was evaluated based on what would offer the easiest, most convenient experience.

The framework I used to map ideas to customer value and business value

Finally, we prioritized the list of ideas within the “High Customer Value, High Business Value” list by technical feasibility to land on a rough approximation of a roadmap. We are currently waiting on leadership approval on the list before we do validation testing with customers.