Emerging Experiences Lab
A practice that harnesses disruptive technologies with light-weight repeatable insight led methods
An Overview
The Logistics
- August 2024 - Present
- Store Strategy Visualization & Alignment
- Ongoing development of a new way of working for Enterprise User Experience
My Role
- The Facilitation: Paired with Principal UXer Danielle Diaz to develop a framework we coined “bets and givens” with the intended outcome to create a shared understanding of each verticals visions. I co-facilitated workshops across product, engineering, and business teams across the verticals of checkout, loyalty, payments, and online.
- The Build: I contributed my industrial design and service design understanding to build out the physical space. Likewise I had experience with Protopie, an advanced prototyping software, to create concept prototypes.
- The Story: I play the role of the customer in all of our presentations. I use presentation skills and storytelling techniques to engage leadership and walk them through ideas.
Key Outcomes
- Co-created a cross-functional methodology & practice that broke down silos across Product, Engineering, and Business teams. Adopted as an official practice within the store UX team.
- Presented an interconnected store vision to 11 Senior Leadership Team members, including the CEO and CFO of a Fortune 500 company, with continous feedback cycles resulting in constant vision iterations ahead of every walk.
- Moved two major initiatives into active FY26 funding consideration by de-risking concepts through low-fidelity prototypes before a dollar was spent in the field. Interconnected Selling initiative is poised to add +$500 million in revenue.
The Problem
Current Siloed Way of Working
Cross-functional Way of Working
Two problems began to converge in fall 2024:
- Due to its size The Home Depot tends to function in silos delivering high quality work but with little consideration of the e2e experience, or neighboring verticals.This lack of cross-functional collaboration was highlighted when a team began to pitch a checkout impacting capability to executive leadership without considering the full journey.
- The post COVID shopper is different: richer understanding of e-commerce and they are deeply informed. The Home Depot has started to acknowledge that the future of retail is heavily interconnected, but we hadn’t yet delivered full experiences that showed this paradigm shift.
The store operations leadership team approached my leadership and asked for a vision:
"What does the in-store checkout experience look like in 4-5 years?" "How does my technology investment come together: computer vision, accuracy prompts, new store apps...?" "Our loyalty team is pitching consumer loyalty, what capabilities are they launching with?" - VP Store Operations
The Process
Unpacking Strategic Themes
We facilitated a series of ideation sessions to capture each verticals existing strategies. To prep for each session we combed through numerous strategy documents and pitch decks to understand where our business units were headed. Our real intention was to locate the root problems in the form of a "How Might We" statement and allow the group to react.
We left these sessions with a set of 23 capabilities our business units were excited by; things like mobile selling, computer vision, RFID, trust scores etc.
We then led a series of rapid ideation sessions so that our product, engineering, and business units felt involved in the shared creation of an interconnected vision. Danielle and I quickly shaped these ideas, paired with the bets and given, outcomes into stories that we could visualize.
Over time our stories have changed and morphed as business interests have changed but in general they remain guided by these key personas:
Low Tech Customer Story -
Our low tech story exists to acknowledge the reality that while we can develop great digital capabilities for our customers, we must remain cognizant of our lowest tech customer. (P.S. This emphasize on a low tech experience being desirable was heavily influenced by personal lessons learned when developing the too "high tech" military discount program years prior.)
Capabilities Highlighted - Core concepts of Interconnected Associate Experience & Common Cart or Unified Selling. Associate Mobile Selling. Single Selling Workflow
Known Customer -
Customers who are digitally engaged spent 3x what our store only shoppers spend, so how might we continue to drive digital engagement? What differentiated digital experiences are provided to our customers when they enter our four walls?
Capabilities Highlighted – Consumer Mobility, AR Measuring, AI Consultation in Aisle, Single Selling Workflow
Pro Customer -
Pros represent our most complex customer and our largest opportunity area as a business. While we highlight multiple capabilities through all the stories that are a benefit to our pro customers, we also recognize they are unique due to their complexity and business structures.
Capabilities Highlighted - Account management, unique tender type optimization, and large order orchestration.
"Sketch" the Whole Idea
We work intentionally low fidelity. This approach is strict to ensure that visuals read as ideas and concepts not as final designs. We were heavily inspired by our Sr Directors early guidance of “no more powerpoints” this led us down the path of translating bullets on slides to walkable stories.
No more powerpoints!
- Cliff Sexton Sr. Director of User Experience
We’ve even downgraded the fidelity of work if it reads as too final. This ensures when leaders walk they focus on the experience we aredesigning and not the pixels they are seeing.
This low fidelity technique is true for both our prototypes as well as our physical environment. I use industrial design techniques to build out models for the space. This provides a stage to showcase our interconnected end-to-end experiences.
That being said, we employ some high fidelity technologies and prototyping techniques if it serves the purpose of better illustrating thestory. For example, using a combination of an Arduino, LEDs, an onboard phone sensor, and ProtoPie we are able to fake a QR code scan to get in the frictionless exit experience. While this might not be the final solution it serves as an anchor in our story and displays how the technologies would be connected. We took a similar approach with our voice commands and AI listening button, higher fidelity prototyping to convey the complexity of the experience.
Check out this video to get an idea of what we present: Interconnected Checkout – Example Scenario
Generate Shared Understanding
The last step in our process involves presenting the work crossfunctionally. We highlight many capabilities in our space and our intention is to derisk and gain alignment ahead of spending a dollar in the field, while also really showcasing an interconnected experience outside of a powerpoint deck.
In order to gain business alignment we began presenting to an internal leadership team. Anyone who contributed ideas in our first phase of unpacking strategic themes was invited to join our presentations/walks to see how their ideas were coming to life and creating full e2e experiences for ourcustomers.
We gave handouts to each participate and like a design critique asked for our walk attendees to leave their feedback on sticky notes that we would collect. This feedback was aggregated for sharing with initiative delivery teams, and also immediately incorporated in to the walk as themes began to emerge. To date we've collected over 1000 pieces of feedback on the various stories.
Prioritization for Initative Delivery
As our work gained visibility, we were invited to present to progressivey higher levels of leadership, from senior directors to VPs to SVPs. Our first executive to walk the space was Anne-Marie Campbell our SEVP of Stores. To date we’ve had the opportunity to present to 11 SLT members at The Home Depot including Ted Decker our CEO and Richard McPhail our CFO. Ahead of each executive walk we incorporate any feedback we’ve gained on the concepts or any strategies we are aware are being considered.
This enabled us to build the confidence in how this solution could work in our environment. We continue to look for opportunities to take concepts out of the EXL space and in to the real world in lean ways.
Increase Fidelity & Confidence via Experimentation
Through the emerging experiences lab we’ve made notable progress by highlighting the experiential value of various capabilties but realize to gain a real understanding of viability requires increasing our confidence in value. I strongly believe in the Lean UX methodology and employ the idea of experimentation in all of my work.
Early on we were told the whimsy of our emerging experience lab would burn out as a side quest unless we could take a capability or experience and deliver it to production to show the real value of the space. With collaboration from our Device Engineering team we built we cheap register on wheels to validate or invalidate our assumptions of mobile selling. This is one of the many experiments that have graduated out of the Emerging Experiences Lab. Taking the example of Associate Mobile Selling, we strongly believe that associates should be untethered and we receive feedback from the field that the fixed nature of checkout creates customer and associate friction. This has been pitched continuously since 2019 and only with the momentum from the lab has it been able to deliver real value through experimentaiton and is actively in development.
Recently we created a low fidelity wall in our space to showcase all of the capabilities and where they are in the process.
Outcomes
What started as a short term effort to establish a crossfunctional vision has turned in to a new way of working for our store user experience team. The emerging experience lab is now a part of our teams yearly goals, with the expectation that all UXers are able to bring partners together to quickly derisk big ideas before spending a dollar in the field.
To date we’ve had the privilege of walking 11 of our SLT members through our presentation, including our CEO Ted Decker and CFO Richard McPhail. Each SLT member has provided high quality feedback and due to the nature of our methodology we’ve implemented their changes in as little as two weeks.
We continue to use this space to gain alignment on big ideas ahead of large investments.
Quotes
“This is how you do nimble innovation”
– EVP of Customer Experience
“I am in the middle of making so many [annual funding] decks for various groups and I just want to tell them to come here instead... This is it” – Director of Online Product
“Thank you for truly painting the "Art of the Possible" through their exceptional work in the Innovation Lab – Phase 1. Their ability to connect current strategies and future visions across Store, Payment, CX Core, and Loyalty is a powerful example of what great cross-functional collaboration and low fidelity prototyping can achieve.” – VP Customer Experience