unifying a physical + digital customer journey
Phygital Retail Design
CX Design | DMBA Experience Studio | 5 months
Opportunity
Goldlink is a retail concept that answers the challenge: how might we offer jewelry to commemorate important relationships unconfined by gender expectations?
Result
A speculative pop-up retail experience spanning social, digital, and physical channels, demonstrating opportunities for the future of jewelry.
Team
Kirsten Collins, Experience Designer
Stephanie Le, Brand Strategist
Stephanie Hoang, Operations
Spring Fang, Product Design
Skills
experience design
UX writing
journey mapping
product design
discovery research
prototyping
user testing
Discovery Research
We were challenged to innovate within the jewelry retail experience. This is a wide space! We started broadly by defining the current jewelry experience and norms in terms of people, place, relationships, objects, jobs, and rules.
And conducted four, 60-minute qualitative interviews with consumers ages 25-49. We deliberately recruited participants with different races and gender identities.
Our research guide was designed to surface the primary jobs to be done for each participant and opportunities across each of the 5e journey phases: entice, enter, engage, exit, extend.
We then split up and visited four different types of jewelry shops and conducted 5e experience teardowns across physical and digital touchpoints.
Synthesis
We synthesized the initial discovery research into three key elements to guide our experience and product design.
Market Insights
1. Jewelry can have sentimental value that is only known to the wearer.**
2. Jewelry can be a shorthand for memories.**
** these ultimately drove our concept
3. Many existing jewelry establishments have a sense of offputting elitism.
4. While sustainability is important to some, others view it as a marketing tactic.
5. Online brands are popular and more accessible but positive in-store experiences are crucial.
6. Storage can be challenging, leading to jewelry scattered around the house.
Opportunity Framework
We found a consumer desire for inclusive custom jewelry that was unmet in the current retail landscape.
Challenge Statement
How might we offer jewelry to commemorate important relationships that is not confined by gender expectations?"
Exploration
With our market insights, framework, and challenge statement as guides, we played around with possible retail concepts generating dozens of options. We used dot voting to select our top four high concepts, and quickly sketched out storyboards to flesh out each of these concepts across a customer journey:
New life for family heirlooms
Friendship bracelets for men
Personal tailor for your jewelry
Engagement rings for all genders
We critiqued the concepts as a team, combined two of them, and selected two storyboards to refine and test with potential customers.
we moved forward with this concept leaning into customization and memories
storyboard frame for “engagement rings for all genders”
I loved playing with this concept, but we weren’t the team to bring it to life
Synthesize Some More
We incorporated what we learned from our storyboard testing with our discovery research and documented our findings into cumulative insight statements.
Cumulative Insights
1. Jewelry can be a shorthand for memories.
2. Personalization stands out as a selling point
3. People need help visualizing what’s possible for personalization
4. Accumulations of jewelry that is sentimental but not worn is a problem waiting to be solved
Decide on a Direction
We decided to proceed with the high concept “Personal Tailor for Your Jewelry” to give heirloom pieces a new life.
Prototype & Iterate On Repeat
We explored this concept further through prototyping with scale models. Once we started building we kept going back to iterate on our concept.
Scale prototype of “Personal Tailor” concept
Critique
We presented two scale prototypes for critique with a panel of four outside designers. This was a crucial step to check our internal thinking and assumptions.
Debate and Decide
Scale prototype of new “Jewelry as Memory Capsule” concept
Through prototyping and critique, we found that the connection between memories and jewelry was something exciting and special, but re-mixing heirloom pieces didn’t feel new enough. Maybe we should pivot to jewelry storage? We had several interesting directions we could go. It was unclear which was best.
I led us through a collaborative decision-making process using three tools:
A MoSCoW framework to make our criteria explicit and prioritized.
Six Thinking Hats to consider the decision from different angles and surface unexpressed opinions and feelings that were blocking a decision.
Team charter — we revisited this together to remind ourselves that we agreed to align by “satisficing,” i.e. reaching a decision that each team member can live with.
After this process it was clear our team was aligned around linking jewelry to a digital memory capsule.
Exploring a combination of both
Rapid prototyping on the spot
Evolve the Direction
We decided to keep the core element of customization but shift from the idea of commemorating heirlooms to savoring memories.
We imagined a participatory retail concept where customers would:
Record a memory (think StoryCorps) in real time
Upload related digital media (photos, videos, music)
Receive a multi-media telling of the memory
Select a piece of jewelry to be engraved with a QR code that unlocks the digital memory
Customers are guided to tell a story about a memory
They receive a custom jewelry piece engraved with a QR code that unlocks a digital scrapbook of their memory
Test at Scale
There were three critical uncertainties with our new concept:
Will participants be more comfortable with a human or a recording guiding them through the experience?
Will participants be willing to share vulnerable memories on the spot?
How long do participants need to spend in the experience to produce a quality end product?
We designed a scale minimum believable product prototype experience to test these uncertainties with outside critics and participants, and iterated the touchpoint design in realtime based on feedback.
Two Major Takaways
Storytelling must be easy and less vulnerable
Need sharp clarity of what exactly customers are buying
Turning Point
Sensing Doubt
At our prototype debrief, we were happy with the clarity of feedback but there was a lingering and fuzzy sense of hesitation and doubt. Our words about the project’s trajectory were positive but our body language was not. I wondered, were we just tired? On the wrong track? Right idea wrong scope? It was time to get building and we needed alignment and confidence in our direction.
Make it Smaller
I took a step back and re-capped what we had learned, and noodled independently on our two takeaways. I wondered what it might look like to shrink the scope.
I proposed a way to keep the big idea of fusing jewelry and memories but make the execution more straightforward.
Propose a Better Way Forward
To make storytelling easier for participants, I took inspiration from the sweet writings coming home in my 2nd grader’s backpack and designed a simple fill-in-the-blank form to capture a memory.
Participants could upload a single photo to our portal, and select a word that would trigger the memory.
We would then engrave the word on a bracelet, print out the story and photo, and package it all together in a card. This created a clear tactile product out of a digital experience, fusing memory and jewelry.
Build Alignment with Visuals
To quickly convey the idea to my team, I sketched out a simple customer journey and presented it at our next meeting. It completely shifted our energy. My teammates responded well to the pared-down, more concrete approach, we aligned on this direction and dove right into figuring out the execution.
Build Out
To showcase this speculative concept, we built a one-day pop-up shop.
We used the 5e framework for designing meaningful experiences as a design guide.
We used this journey map to design a unified experience across interactions and touchpoints.
Entice
Enter
Customers are further enticed by seeing and hearing our jewelers active at a workbench. Upon entry, customers are greeted by a host (that’s me!).
Host orients customers to the space by
showing a sample final product
telling a story about what to expect
guiding customers to a wall with example stories for inspiration.
Engage
I designed the digital storytelling interaction. I used Typefrom as a tool because it allowed us to build quickly and the built-in UX met our criteria to simulate a conversation and upload media. It also allowed us to maintain a branded world that didn’t feel like a survey.
I tested it with 12 users over two days to confirm functionality and clarity and to generate example stories for the inspiration wall. User testing resulted in copy edits, changes in the order of steps, and a tone adjustment.
Exit
Leave with a personalized bracelet and memory, ready to gift or savor.
At exit, customers are also prompted to sign up for the mailing list and follow on Instagram.
Extend
Prompted to return through email newsletter and Instagram postings.
Gives package as a gift, and feels a warm connection and a fond memory whenever they see their friend wearing the bracelet.
Posted branded content to Instagram promoting the pop up.
Customers interact with inspiration wall.
QR code links to digital “memory booth.”
Customers are guided step by step through writing a memory story.
After completing the storytelling interaction, customers are led to the jewerly workbench. While waiting for their jewelry and card to be made, customers can engage with our jewelry experts to learn about the process, materials, and Goldlink story.
Learnings
Future of Jewelry
Storyboarding with images and text is a more effective and efficient way to communicate experiential concepts than just written or spoken descriptions. We moved faster once we started saying, “here, let me show you what I mean.”
Many challenges were solved by reiterating “What’s the real goal here?” Or “Can we make it smaller?” That always unlocked a new approach or solution.
Teaming
Participants engaged nearly twice as long with the digital storytelling form than in a human interaction. We hypothesize that removing the interpersonal dynamic allowed users to be more immersed in flow without relational pressure.
Feedback supported our identified opportunity for jewelry that commemorates relationships outside of gender norms.
Fusing jewelry and memories is a fast track to meaningful retail experiences.