neiman-marcus

Our team was tasked with reimagining how customers engage with the Neiman Marcus iPhone application.  Immediately, we set out to learn about luxury shoppers’ behaviors, motivations, and needs, through in-depth empathy interviews. Ultimately, we designed several new feature concepts for the app, and developed a long-term roadmap for Neiman Marcus's digital success.

Contextual Inquiries

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We conducted ethnographic, in-home interviews with 12 luxury shoppers from San Francisco and Dallas. We had them map out a typical shopping journey for us–what was the experience like for them, from the inception of their want or need, all the way past purchasing to returns? We even went on a shop-along with the participants at a luxury retail store of their choice, to observe them in action.

We learned that luxury shoppers wanted:

• Fashion guidance. They deeply trust their network of sales associates to help “make” them a unique version of themself.

• Someone to prepare daily curated content about interesting fashion trends. They need to stay in the know so they can continually build their wardrobe.

• Sales associates attention when the want it, but only at that moment.

Most importantly, though, we found that people don't use apps to shop luxury retail – they use the web. So, we had to take a different approach.

Instead of simply trying to drive customers to use the app to shop, how could we utilize the technology of the app to make shopping a better experience overall?

Proposed Concepts

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We created 36 different concepts, and worked closely with the Neiman Marcus team to assess the feasibility of our ideas. From there, we chose 6 of our most promising concepts.

Storyboarding

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We continued to develop and iterate on the concepts, taking them from concept dashboards to storyboards. We would use these storyboards as guide for our exploratory usability testing.

Iterative Prototyping & Usability Testing

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We created a faux-in-store experience, and tested our concepts with actual shoppers in this context. After our first round testing, we tweaked our concepts a bit to reflect some of what we’d learned. Then, we conducted a second round of in-context usability tests.