Best Buy • Appointment Finder

UX DESIGN

One way of understanding user’s problems and frustrations with their online experiences at Best Buy is through the feedback forum, Opinion Lab, that allows them to tell us what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong. One of the things that business stakeholders saw from customer feedback was how difficult it was locating their appointments, as well as knowing that, rather than make an online account to access their appointment details, consumers would call in to the Best Buy call center to find out about their appointment. Best Buy wanted to create an easy way for them to get to their appointment details online, and ultimately reduce traffic to the call centers. 

Business Background 

Through Opinion Lab, the Best Buy feedback portal, one of the biggest consistent complaints from consumers was that finding an appointment was very confusing. An initial testing of the various entry points to find appointments revealed an inconsistent and overly complex experiences to locate appointments. Also we wanted to reduce the call volume at the call centers, so we wanted to find out if there was an easier, more “frictionless” approach to finding an appointment for users without an account. 

Goals

• To give users a clear path, without having to create an account to timely information about their upcoming appointment, either to reference, reschedule or cancel and reduce user abandonment.

• To reduce call volume to Geeks Squad help centers.

• Reduce the volume of “no shows” when consumers can’t find their appointments. 

Journey Maps 

First I created a journey map to understand the problem from the users perspective. Using the current website, I worked with the research team to create a test to validate our assumptions about the path that a user takes to find their appointment, as well as what does the user do when they can’t find their appointment. 

Mapping The User Flow 

Next, we mapped out the entire appointment flow to understand how to implement the appointment finder, and where in the flow it would work. 

Original Appointment Flow

Mapping The Appointment Finder Flow 

The team of UX, product and engineering mapped out the appointment finder guest flow and started creating sprints. This allowed the engineers to get a head start on looking at how to implement the new component and uncover potential problems with guests verses authenticated users. 

Appointment Finder Flow

Visual Design

With an accelerated timeline, we jumped directly into designing the screens. Throughout the process, we put our designs through user testing to validate our hypothesis’ about the design, making sure we were keeping the design simple, clear and easy to navigate.

Outcomes & Results

• Testing showed that users were able to easily find the entry point to their appointment details after we implemented a “Manage an Appointment” link in the services drop down menu.

• Call center volume dropped by 8.3%, compared to the prior 3 months.

• “No shows” dropped by 4.7%, compared to the prior 3 months. 

Future State

Expand collaboration
Share insights and objectives with the security team and others across the UX/Product digital landscape to gain insights and alignment towards a better authentication process, like a 6 character SMS passcode. 

Data analytics
Continue to analyze the data of the traffic patterns to understand how customers are looking for their appointments. 

Redesigning the flow
During testing of the final iteration, we learned that some users struggled with the appointment types (i.e., in-store verses repair; or what is “remote service”?) To help alleviate the confusion, we thought that another approach to the design would help simplify the flow and the user’s intentions for help. By using tiles with visual icons, we hypothesized that it would be easier to understand, and well as help make the user feel more confident about the path they were taking to get to their appointment information.