Requirements Gathering & Method Description

Requirements Gathering

Background

Our problem space is about improving the curbside pick up experience for The Home Depot customers. Our hypothesis is that although curbside pick up as a service can be accessed by almost anyone with smartphones and computers, people of different demographic backgrounds and age ranges may experience the service differently and encounter different struggles. We wanted to further narrow down our user group and find a specific type of user to serve by collecting data from The Home Depot and deciding who our users are based on insights from our data.

To do this, we sat down with our partners, UX Designers at The Home Depot, and asked clarifying questions around what specific problem areas we should be focusing on and who we are improving this experience for.

Survey

According to Morning Consult, “buy online, pick up in store” became a pandemic-era shopping hero for those who want to minimize health related risk (Tassin, 22). Though it used to be a necessary way to avoid traffic in stores, curbside pick up in the post-pandemic era has remained because of its many benefits: customers value time-savings and convenience, and it even helps some avoid having impulse purchases. We wanted to understand in a quick and straightforward way, from as many people as possible, the following insights:

• Do people still use curbside after COVID? If so, why do people enjoy curbside pick up experiences?

• Where do people usually go for curbside pick up orders vs in store purchases, and how often do they do it?

• If someone has used curbside pick up at THD, do they enjoy it? What are some of the areas they think can be improved?

Interview

We wanted to dig deep and understand the more sentimental aspect of why people would use curbside pick up services as well as things that surveys couldn't help us surface, such as sentiments and personal preferences, so we decided to conduct interviews. Since Home Depot offers mainly home improvement materials and appliances, not that many people in our group’s age group have had the need to shop there frequently yet. As a result, we have to think outside of the box to reach people who may have the need to buy home improvement products.

We reached out to people who fall into the following categories:

• New home owners who have needs to remodel their house

• Real estate agents who might know home modelers who needs to refill orders on materials and equipments often

• THD employees who have experienced curbside pick up before

We conducted three types of interviews:

• Unstructured

• Semi-structured

• Structured

Contextual Inquiry

To help us explore more first hand curbside pickup experiences and gather demographic data, we reached out to Dr. Bruce for advice and suggestions. Dr. Bruce placed a curbside pickup order at THD and recorded her experience from arriving at the store, waiting for the order, to filling out the feedback survey. It provided us with insights of the pain points in curbside pickup from a customer’s perspective, and the shortcomings in the lack of pickup status update and instructions on how to find curbside pickup spots, as well as the quality control of products, that helped guide us to synthesize research interview questions.

Store Visit

In order to understand the curbside pickup process end to end, we scheduled a store visit with Chandler, our THD partner to interview two associates. We wanted to find out how curbside pickup orders are notified to the associates, how they are staged, and the steps involved in delivering the products to customers in the curbside parking spot. Most importantly, it was crucial for us to gauge the demographic and characteristics of customers who place curbside pickup orders, such as age, gender, ability, etc, since our industry partner has not collected that information. In the meantime, the struggles associates have with curbside pickup gave us insight into some of the pain points customers might be experiencing. For this purpose, we designed a semi-structured interview with two sections of questions. We chose semi-structured interviews since it allowed us to expand and ask follow up questions if there’s anything we didn’t anticipate from our questions.

Online Forum Sentiment Analysis

Part of our research was to search the internet for first-hand user feedback. This is because we have had trouble connecting to THD curbside users directly for interviews, and even for surveys. We googled “Home Depot curbside review” and opened the different articles, blog posts, and reddit threads that went along with this. This helped us capture feelings across a broad range of users in different locations, with different order sizes and of all ages. We captured information from a father/contractor in Arkansas, using curbside for mulch and garden stakes, a 30 yr old woman from Duluth, GA, picking up large amounts of insulation for her home, and six others. These were chosen at random from the Yelp reviews that had mentioned “curbside” in their feedback. Also, the father from Arkansas has his own blog where he reviewed the curbside experience in depth. We were given clear pain points and frustrations that the users dealt with, and we captured those in many notes in our affinity diagram.

Competitive Analysis

After we looked through our survey data, which focused on curbside experiences in general, we found competitors that were leading the way. One of which was Target, where users had previously shopped and overall mentioned a positive experience (RTIH, 2022). We took a trip to Target and documented the process of buying toothpaste. While this is not a common “home improvement” item that could be at THD, Target is a competitor in the home decor space and is leading the industry for curbside satisfaction (RTIH, 2022). Given this, we were interested to learn more. A few things to note in the Target user flow is that curbside pickup is selected immediately, it’s not like Home Depot where users select “Store Pickup” then narrow to “Curbside” once it is ready. Additionally, Target asks users where they want their items loaded in their car. This helps customers and associates ensure a comfortable and smooth handoff. Lastly, the app also asks users to keep their windows rolled up, and show a code to the associate, to match the proper order to the correct car. Some of these findings were proven to be items that our surveyed and interviewed customers preferred, for various reasons.