LOWE'S DESIGN CHALLENGE

Course: Research-Design-Build

Professors Greg Holderfield, Martha Cotton, Leah Marcus

Segal Design School, McCormick School of Engineering

Fall 2018

CHALLENGE: Partner with Lowe's Business Design Unit to predict the immediate and long-term future of retail.

Having steadily lost market share to competitors and digital disruptors, Lowe's sought dramatic solutions to support a rapidly evolving retail landscape.

Our recommendations provided a framework for Lowe's to more effectively collect and use customer data, empowering them to look before they leap and make innovation decisions rooted in core customer needs.

Our idea was ultimately selected by Lowe's as the winning solution.

Deliverables:

Primary and secondary research
Customer mindset framework
Mobile UX
Business model
Implementation plan
Pitch presentation

RESEARCH

1. Initial research sought to understand customers' brand associations, and in-store and online shopping experience with Lowe's

2. We then narrowed our research objectives, focusing on passionate super-users across the retail space. We wanted to center Lowe's at the intersection of people's strong and complicated feelings about retail and their homes.

3. An online survey helped guide our secondary research into retail rockstars effectively facilitating strong customer loyalty

4. In-store observations, secret shopping, and customer shadowing helped illuminate how the Lowe's in-store experience compared with competitors'

5. We conducted over twenty customer interviews across 8 states

6. Interview subjects participated in a sorting game to expose their retail associations and experiences

SYNTHESIS

Across our interviews, we continually came back to a single theme: motivations for entering a Lowe's store can vary tremendously from customer to customer or even from moment to moment.

Further, Lowe's current customer segmentation framework (Do-it-yourself, Do-it-for-me, Semi-pro, Pro) was not accurately capturing customers' nuanced shopping needs, particularly as related to

How much help they wanted
Whether they knew what they wanted to buy

SOLUTION: Identification

In order to identify customer needs, we developed a multi-modal customer mindset framework.

The two axes represented:

Inspiration: whether or not you know what you want to buy
Autonomy: whether or not you want help

We labeled it the Lowe's Tool-B.E.L.T, after the four primary modes:
Browser, Explorer, Learner, and Transactor.

SOLUTION: Service

VIABILITY

Our pitch to Lowe's executives targeted four primary engines for revenue growth and also highlighted benefits from the consumer and corporate perspectives.

Lowe's commented on both the quality of our ideas and the persuasiveness of our pitch structure, ultimately selecting our team as the winning idea.

We built a UX prototype to show how Lowe's could capture our new customer modalities, both via a mobile app and an entry kiosk. Our research indicated the importance of pairing these solutions, accounting for customers' varying relationships with technology.

IMPLEMENTATION

Our implementation plan utilized a "Step, Stretch, Leap" framework, highlighting the power of digital kiosks across analogous industries (including fast food and airlines) and showing clear opportunities to grow Lowe's business in both the short and long term.

BARRY SHAFRIN

LOWE'S DESIGN CHALLENGE​