How Best Buy Scaled Customer Feedback with dscout
Matthew Doty of Best Buy takes us through how dscout helps "plot the course" of their future experience design initiatives.
In an ever-evolving march toward progress, Best Buy uses a steady stream of customer feedback as their North Star. From the robust insights gained from Diary studies to the real-time participant reactions gleaned through Live missions, dscout plays a critical role in helping Matthew and his team get that feedback.
We sat down with Matthew Doty, Head of Strategic Experience Design to learn more about how he and his team are helping the organization navigate the sometimes uncertain waters toward the future of experience design.
Take note now, and analyze later
Interacting with research participants in person through Live missions and remote interviews allows the team to dive deeper into responses and better understand the user’s mindset in the moment.
“We need to test the concepts that we're creating by gauging customer responses and emotional reactions to our earliest conceptual models. We start out with two-dimensional things that are very easy to show people via a Live mission. This provides real-time feedback—observing their facial expressions now and analyzing later.
Live missions and remote interviews lend themselves so well to representing a story of what the future could be. It allows us to ask forward-thinking questions, and put our customers in that mindset. And we have a dialogue based on what they’re seeing, and how they’re reacting to what we’re building.
That allows us to probe in real-time and get into questions like, ‘You mentioned that you liked this certain aspect—but what would need to be true for you to actually engage in that way?’ We can get a lot of rich feedback in the moment.”
Expand your foundations
Matthew and his team knew they needed to look beyond Minneapolis to find their ideal participants, they turned to dscout to expand their reach nationally and find the tech-savvy users they were looking for.
“It became really clear upfront that since we’re designing things for a company with a national and international reach, it doesn’t make sense to only talk to people here in Minneapolis.
dscout allowed us to very quickly start interacting with a broad spectrum of people. This happens both asynchronously through diary studies and synchronously through Live missions, and we get types of insights we need from a discovery and evaluative standpoint.
Even as we expand our reach, we have a very focused primary persona. They’re fairly tech-savvy, caught up on what’s going on with technology, and passionate about it. Because dscout is a platform that requires people to be savvy with smartphones, we naturally come out with a better quality of participant. We get the type of people who are comfortable engaging in that way.
It’s a side benefit that the type of people who are naturally drawn to engage with something like dscout are already 50% of the way there in terms of aligning with our target audience. This is who we’re designing for. I actually do not see a future for my team where dscout is not playing a critical role in what we’re doing.”
Prepare to sail into uncharted waters
For the Best Buy team, the trick to making an impact is to be flexible in your course of action.
“As we start to make meaningful progress toward what we’re recommending, we’re going to immediately start learning things that challenge that vision.
Yes, We have this future-facing, North Star vision for whatever initiative we happen to be working on, but it is not set in stone. As we learn things that challenge that perspective, it’s okay to move that flag as long as we always are marching toward something.
Get an inside look at how other leading organizations use dscout
See how companies like T-Mobile, Dropbox, and Bose use dscout to keep their organizations human-centric with this ebook.
