Reserve & Pick Up

As a household name, Best Buy Canada is one of the largest omni-channel retailers of consumer technologies, expanded assortment, and marketplace sellers. As a subsidiary of Best Buy Co., its partnerships collectively generate billions of dollars in annual revenue.

Role: User Experience Architect

Get your Product in Store

With the compelling value proposition of “Your order will be ready within 20 minutes”, Reserve and Pick-up enables customers to place an item on hold through the website and purchase it in store when it’s convenient for them. Every year since 2012, millions of customer reserve and pick-up their orders with an unchanged process. This meant that there was tremendous opportunity in optimizing the customer experience of the very clunky reservation process.

Understanding the Problem

The greatest drop off point in the customer journey was right before completion of the reservation process. Instead of focusing in on this single signal, I looked holistically at the problem. In the heuristic evaluation, I quickly realized that the customer journey did not follow common conventions, it lacked information hierarchy, and broken links and functionalities were rampant throughout the reservation process.

I also identified three experience metrics to enhance:

1. Increasing Clarity: So that customers can better understand which store their product is being held at.

2. Building Urgency: So that customers become more critical in deciding whether they are available to pick the item up at the beginning and reduce held up stock.

3. Allow for the flexibility and efficiency of use: In reference to Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics, it is so that customers can speed up their interactions with the system as necessary. 

The Team and the Work

By mapping out the user and system flow, the team consisting of six developers, a copywriter, QA, UI Designer, and myself were aligned on what we were trying to achieve and spoke the same language in the development process. Touchpoints and information hierarchy were reordered for alignment and clarity. Collaborating with another team, quick links were added to the product information page so that customers has flexibility and efficiency of deciding where to purchase the item.

The Result

The improved Reserve and Pickup experience was a huge success. Based on a three week long multi-variant test, the combination of quick links and the overall improved experience increased revenue by 36% and revenue per visitor by 8%. When reevaluated 6 months later, Reserve and Pickup consistently drives around 40% increase to revenue.

With such a dramatic increase in revenue and improvements to the digital experience, it demanded change beyond an e-commerce level. The business had to take steps to reevaluate staffing to better support the influx of customers arriving to a store to pick up their products.