The Nordstrom Product Group wanted to build a store locator feature for the iPhone. There was consistent and growing traffic from mobile users on the existing store locator feature on the web and this was a natural next step for the native app given the phone’s capabilities. A decent chunk of users were visiting the mobile website on iOS devices so we wanted to provide an experience in our iPhone app.
I was the lead UX designer on the project and I worked alongside a UX researcher. We had the opportunity to do both quantitative and qualitative research on the project and met with a variety of users that stretched across all of our mobile personas. We had the opportunity to produce both low and high fidelity prototypes and test them with those users. I provided everything including user flows, sketches, wireframes, visual designs and redlines. The wireframes were done in Omnigraffle, prototypes in Axure and visual design in Illustrator and Photoshop.
We had the opportunity to take an outdated experience on the web and turn it into something that took advantage of the unique iOS mobile device features. We had a bunch of store information that we could have put into the app, but we worked closely with our users to determine what was the most relevant and simplified the experience. Since most users were using this feature on the go, we wanted to create an experience that got the excess out of the way and provided the most pertinent information. We were also going to build the Buy Online Pickup In Store feature for the app in a subsequent sprint and we needed to anticipate how it was going to dovetail into this experience.
I worked closely with the project owner and development team on conceptual sketches for the Store Locator.
We did our wireframes in Omnigraffle and were able to do early and rapid user testing to get feedback before we moved on to the visual design.
The Store Locator feature was designed with the Nordstrom user personas in mind. More specifically, we focused on users who were frequent BOPIS (Buy Online and Pickup In Store) users and also users of in store services. Our user testing was done with this target audience.
We learned the our users did not need every piece of information about the store and were able to trim the experience down into something that was simple and intuitive.
