Under-the-Roof Operational Tooling Suite

Amazon Style was an apparel store with technology enabled fitting rooms. While inside, customers could order clothes from a tablet and have it delivered. Within minutes, just like magic, their clothes would appear in the fitting room. My challenge was to make that “magic” happen by creating digital tooling to enable super fast fulfillment in-store.

Problems

  • Store employees needed a way to find apparel items stored in the back and deliver to a customer’s fitting rooms in minutes

  • To have a large selection for customers’ to order, new inventory was sent to the store daily that needed to be received, tagged, and stored

  • Customers needed a way to see the full clothing selection and have employees assist them in ordering if uncomfortable with the technology

Goals

  • Re-use existing tools wherever possible

  • Make tools fit into physical workflow seamlessly

  • Reduce any non-essential device interactions

Solution
An Operational Tooling suite that enabled employees to execute on super fast fulfillment while supporting Inbound, Fulfillment, Inventory Management, and Guest Services processes in the store.

My Impact

  • Customers received the clothes they ordered at their fitting room in 3 - 8 minutes depending on the size of the order

  • Employees were able to use tooling to meet business goals with minimum cognitive load

Role

  • Research

  • Design Strategy

  • Interaction & UI Design

  • Usability Testing

Team

  • R&D Operations

  • Store Designer

  • Product Manager

  • UX Designer

Duration
2020 - 2023

My Design Process

 When I joined the team for this new retail store concept it was still early days. There were ideas of how each operational process could or should work, but nothing was finalized. It was complex and highly ambiguous. The employee experience for Amazon Style was just words on paper and blue tape on the floor. I had to get scrappy and figure out how to make it come to life….

Research

Role playing to gain empathy

I started by immersing myself into the project’s lab space. I stepped through every employee process from Inbound to Delivery. I documented the steps and physical touchpoints. I opened the storage bins, pushed the racks, and unboxed the product. I talked to every stakeholder on the team to understand who were the employees of the store and what roles would they be doing.

Key Takeways

  • Back-of-House (BOH) employees would not interface with customers when delivering items to Fitting Rooms. They would deliver to a “secret closet” in the back of the Fitting Room.

  • Only Front-of-House (FOH) employees would help customers. FOH employees would cross train in all areas to support Pickup, POS, and assist customers in ordering items from the back.

  • BOH Employees had lots of things to decipher between to execute this fast fulfillment. The variables included: picking and transport equipment, location to pick, conveyance between floors, destination of parking vs. fitting room vs. Pickup.

  • The tool design had to be super simple and reduce the cognitive load employees were already facing.

Driving Strategy & Alignment

Storyboards to align & simplify processes

I used storyboards as a way to quickly document the full physical and digital touchpoints across the 9 unique processes in BOH. I need to align the teams on the core processes first, before jumping into the detailed tool design. I was able to call out challenges, assumptions and simplifications in the process.

Key Simplifications

  • Inbound process simplified to one tool and scan that receives the item into inventory and automatically prints clothing tag to attach to item

  • Bin scans eliminated in Pick workflow to reduce time and optimize for the happy path

  • Equipment scans simplified to the start and end of pick process only

Wireframes & User flows

With the core processes now signed off, I organized whiteboard sessions to with product to work collaboratively on the tool flows. This allowed me to shape the product strategy and requirements as it was being written. I created wireframes and flows for each core BOH Process and reviewed with the team. Engineering could move forward with their scoping but it became clear that there were lots of edge cases that the broader team needed to align on the experience.

What could go wrong when delivering clothes to a customer in their fitting room?

  • Employee can’t find the shoes, pants, shirt that was ordered

  • The fitting room closet door is open, and employee can’t deliver items

  • The touchscreen is broken and the customer can’t order clothes

  • The closet door didn’t lock all the way….

  • Employee delivered the wrong items

  • Employee took too long to deliver the items and customer left room

  • There is no internet in the store

Facilitating an “in-person” workshop with teams

I needed my team to develop empathy for the situations that could happen across edge cases before deciding on how to handle it. I convinced a representative from six teams to travel to the lab space in 2020, to mask up and role play the scenarios.

Together we aligned on the experiences we could deliver for launch and beyond. I used Service Blueprints as a documentation method to align on roles and responsibilities post workshop.

Iterating on UI design

I sketched out different ways to organize the information in the tools. I wanted to ensure employees knew what action to take with minimal cognitive load.

Prototype & Usability Testing

Key Learnings

  • Image was the most important way to find an item in a bin or rack quickly

  • Once they had the item, they would match up the last four of the barcode to the tool UI screen

  • Employees needed a durable way to carry device and still push rack and find clothes without it getting in the way

I had to get scrappy on how actually to test the tools with no open stores and hired employees.

  • I recruited fulfillment center employees to be the testers.

  • I gathered clothing items from the lab, and “planted them throughout BOH” in storage bins to simulate an actual Pick Path.

  • I designed UI screens to match the clothing and built out the pick path into prototypes that I ran on the actual Zebra device.

Aligning the physical and digital experiences

I worked with our Brand and Operations teams to align on colors that could be used in the physical and digital experience. I kept the tool UI design simple with iconography, large type and buttons and bold colors.

Delivery Handoff

I handed off my prototypes and implementation specifications for engineering to build.

  • Guest Services - New FOH Tool on tablet for assistance in guest ordering and tasks

  • Inbound process - New Prep Tool on fixed tablet

  • Fulfillment - New Pick & Deliver Tools on handheld device

Amazon closed the Style concept in October of 2023 to focus on other initiatives in the business.

Tools being used in action

After almost two years of working on this concept, the first Amazon Style store launched on May 25, 2022. I got to see employees using the tools that I built with my team from the ground up. There is nothing quite like the feeling.

Key Takeaways

Learnings

  • New back-end systems should be thoroughly tested prior to the launch on tools in-store

  • It is faster to have employees walk down stairs to deliver items, then hand-off to conveyance methods or place in staging for another employee to complete delivery

Challenges

  • It’s hard to account for all of the scenarios that can happen across tools without an open store

  • Simulating how the tools and processes would work at both Peak and Non-Peak was difficult