Client

Product Design and Development (PD+D) Business within Target Corporation

Project

Co-found a new team, the Advanced Development Group, to support the organization's desire to focus on human centered design, applied "horizon 2" research, and create a platform for owned brand Connected Products.

Case Study Summary

Connected Products was a combination of forming a team, developing a service, and creating work streams to spread use of a smart IoT platform. The team was chartered to discover, develop, maintain, and integrate a platform comprised of embedded product hardware/firmware and a mobile app.

The Advanced Development Group (ADG) created Target's Connected Products platform which was used to launch three product lines totaling nine different products across Lighting and Seasonal.

Background Context

• PD+D produces more than 80,000 own brand SKU's (individual products + product variants) every year.
• Each cross functional team works on a tight schedule based on physical product creation constraints ranging from fashion trends, material availability, manufacturing quality and timing, shipping, and business funding.
• Smart products and the Internet of Things (IoT) was a growing trend permeating nearly all categories of consumer goods. To add smartness and connectivity to existing products was a significant change for Target that no individual product team could handle within a regular product development cycle.
• Our initial endeavor was to integrate the platform with two existing product categories Lighting and Seasonal.

Problem

• Internal needs.
• Designers, merchants, and mechanical engineers want a reusable and flexible set of components to embed smartness in a variety of categories and products. Target standard product design cycles are too fast to create hardware, firmware, and software needed to control connected and smart products.
• External/guest needs. "Guest" is Target's term for audience/user/customer.
• Key research finding was that parents want to dim or turn off a night light without disturbing their child.
• People who decorate for holidays and want their decorations to be expressive of the guest's design taste with colors and sounds to match.
• Application best practices mean making the application easy to learn and customize.
• Guests did not always want an application, we needed to determine if we could, make the product work on its own without an application. If an app is needed it needs to be simple and accessible.
• Expect to pay Target prices for premium products.

Assumptions

• The small scrappy core team will be able to develop and support the platform while educating Product teams and spreading its use.
• Agile tools and techniques will help the team and our clients amidst a wider set of waterfall tools and techniques practiced by most product teams in PD+D.
• All team members needed to be high performers able to wear multiple hats, independent thinkers and self starters.

Process

• Phase 0: Early Proof of Concept (Ryan, Patrick, Alex, Elizabeth, and Kent)
  • Four team members part time on Fridays acted on their collective vision performing scrappy research, product and category exploration to discover the category of lighting as a good place to start.
• Phase 1: Public Beta of the Ara Lighting Collection, Further Research and Prototypes for Both Lighting and Seasonal
  • Primary research: Team interviews, stakeholder, subject matter expert interviews.
  • Primary research: Initial proof of concept public beta, gather learning and insights via:
    • App usage
    • Usability study
    • App feedback
    • Media reaction: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-smart-light-thats-a-genius-at-simplicity-1484237444
    • Experience sampling study 1, early users of the public beta lamps and app.
    • Experience sampling study 2, the journey highs and lows of people who choose to decorate for and celebrate Halloween
  • Secondary research: existing lighting products app design, flow, information architecture. Install and use a variety of connected products and their apps to map out their experiences.
  • Establish quarterly survey for US adult population awareness of IoT products and uses.
  • Created the core human centered desirability hypotheses for the platform, an evidence informed design of guest behavior based personas, their journeys, and potential jobs to be done to serve joyful moments and alleviate pain points.
  • The engineers on the team established the supply chain and manufacturing process. This is a large and complex portfolio of work that ranges from creating specifications, negotiating price and logistics, testing hardware, testing manufacturing samples, and teaching a lamp manufacturer how to solder the smart hardware into their lamp.
  • Meanwhile, I created designs and prototypes of the application to support the lighting collection lamp and work with additional types of lighting and seasonal products and improve accessibility of the app.
  • I was also deployed to develop and present the argument/conversation for one app for all Target own brand connected products.
• Phase 2: Initial Version, Full Platform Ready
  • Primary research 1: Telling the story of consumer IoT, share our research and team journey so far and gather our leadership team reactions.
  • Primary research 2: Initial proof of concept public beta, gather learning and insights via:
    • App usage monitoring and using data to inform designs for feature awareness, adoption, and considering new potential use cases.
    • Usability study, app design refinements for full RGB color control and new smart actions to automate devices.
    • App feedback via guest reviews and Studio Connect where we post questions and discussion topics for a survey panel of Guests.
    • Guest seasonal feedback expo: demonstrate prototypes and brief interview for reactions.
  • Improve the process: establish a technology readiness process to help merchants avoid process failure for new connected products. (Lead by Kent, with human centered contributions by myself)
  • Continue adding new data points to the quarterly survey for general US adult population awareness of IoT products and uses.
• Phase 3: Growth
  • Team Growth
    • Full Business Case to Scale: Business and UX Strategy
  • Application Growth
    • App Design Refinements
    • Voice UI Design
    • Connected Prototypes Consulting (details not sharable)
    • Additional Platforms Integration Research and Design: mobile OS platform actions, STEM/STEAM via MIT's Scratch 3.x project
    • Android App release, usage monitoring, iteration.
  • Product Growth
    • Seasonal Team Collaboration
    • Release of Sweet Slumber Nightlights
• Phase 4: Scale Two Work Streams: New Technology and Connected Platform
  • Presented Business and UX Strategy business case to SVP leadership.
  • We made an interactive holiday tree and card to celebrate and demonstrate more possibilities.

My Role

• UX Lead
  • Lead each stage of work, client facing, presented results.
• Phase 0: UX Consultant
• Phase 1 - 4: UX Lead
• UX Research
  • Planned research protocols
  • Lead interviews with client and users.
  • Secondary research, data gathering, insight forming and sharing.
  • Used tools such as:
    • Tabling in an expo setting with guests participating in brief interviews.
    • Experience sampling and summarizing via dScout.
    • Google Consumer Surveys.
• UX Design
  • Evidence and goal based design
  • Sketches
• Collaborative Facilitator
  • Facilitated sessions based on platform, apps, process , team reflection and chartering and evolution.
• Visual Design
  • Using established branding rules, and following a hybrid of Apple iOS conventions with Android Material design.
• UX Engineer
  • Interactive prototypes

Core Team

• Team Director: Ryan McCoy (pre-phase 1), then Jim Wilson, then later Patrick Douglas
• Product Manager: Kent Katterheinrich
• Hardware Engineer: Patrick Greenwell
• Firmware Engineer: Alex SneedMiller, then later Eric Marks
• Product Industrial Design: Elizabeth Kern, Ryan McCoy, Jim Wilson
• UX Lead: Rob Stenzinger

Outcomes

• The case was made and funded to create a team to make connectedness and smartness possible for Target's own brand products.
• The Advanced Development Group (ADG) created Target's Connected Products platform.
• Sales: sold through small manufacturing runs
• Ara Lights (sold out)
• Sweet Slumber Night Lights (sold out)
• Wondershop Holiday Tree (sold out)
• Application Adoption: near one to one attachment rate for apps and products.
• User research to help product teams with building connected products. Helped product designers and engineers have a plug and play option for their fast development cycles.
• Through stakeholder interviews learned from hundreds of Target team members and leadership.
• Presented our findings via mini workshops and science fair settings.
• Received some good press: in this Wall Street Journal article