Nordstrom Innovation Lab

See how the Nordstrom Innovation Lab created, tested and built an iPad app in just one week. For more information, visit: www.nordstrominnovationlab.com

[@MichaelJamesSeattle]

This video helps illustrate that agility is enhanced by team members working directly with customers, working in small increments, and avoiding excess process steps, stage gates, handoffs, and role distinctions.

[@daudaiyabo8538]

Basically

[@zzh315]

maybe a better question to ask first is -- is the software useful? Souds like a camera app with extra steps, and why not just use mirrors.

[@bluekirty]

Because people want to compare what they look like with the different pairs.

[@zzh315]

@@bluekirty thus the camera app that ipad already had

[@adaobiifeachor2439]

Good video. I think that the flash builds are a genuinely good idea. I do wonder how they avoided putting too much weight on what one customer might think of an iteration, though. Or, was that just a risk they were willing to take?

[@yulymichelle375]

I hope to help.. I'm JB Brown, the Nordstrom Innovation Lab manager, and this is the lab. We work on one week experiments. Somebody will have an idea and we'll find a way to figure out how to prove if the idea is going to work. And this week the Innovation Lab is going to be building an iPad app with customer feedback as we go through the week. We wanted to work in the store to make sure that we were getting customer feedback as we worked, so that we were never working on anything that wasn't valued by the customer and only doing things that are delivering value. So we'll be building a feature and testing it until we get to the point where we have something that's good enough that we can just leave. And we'll leave the iPad app behind and have this new thing that customers can use. This is the world's first flash build. It's a flash mob where software team shows up and built an application and a surprise location. This is the Nordstrom Innovation Lab, and we're at the flagship store downtown Seattle. Right now. The team is just setting up their equipment. To get started. We're going to build an iPad app that helps customers pick the best pair of sunglasses for them. We really don't know what the features are yet. We're going to use customer feedback as we go along throughout the day and the rest of the week. In order to build the best thing. So the next thing we're going to do is user story map. So we're going to sit here and together outline all the steps to customer would take and actually even beforehand how they buy sunglasses, like what are the different things that they might do and how that process might change. If we have this application will actually dig into what we have to build in order to support that process. So now that we've done a card mapping, we're going to do a paper prototype and this is something that we commonly do in the animation lab. It's a great way to show what we'd like to do in a rough prototype that. We can easily throw out change alter based on feedback from the customers. I'll continue building individual paper slides and our user experience specialist at Hotel will bring the prototype to a customer and say, OK, I have this app and this is a paper version. I'd like you to kind of use it like you would normally use an app, and you can press things, interact with them, and then she'll change out the pages based on how the customer uses it. So it's a similar experience to the iPad, only an analog version. So it's day. Two, and we have our first working prototype of this app, and how it works is I take my first pair of sunglasses, put it on. The picture all right and then I want to compare it to this other pair I've got right here. He's on. Take another picture and I can just pull these up like this and see which one I like better. Well, telling Kim, having talking to people and doing paper prototypes. We've been coding, building an iPad. We take a stab at something, we look at the paper prototypes they can't put together. We might take one at a time. Usually we come to the board and we grab the most important feature and we start implementing it. The really cool thing with this flash build is that we have actual real customers. Just today we delivered four or five different separate. Features and I deliver it, swap the iPad with tell she'd go and talk to a customer and 10 minutes later I had feedback from real customers about this thing that I delivered and it changed how we did the next thing. And it's been really, really great watching day-to-day what they've been doing. The team to get all the feedback from the sales people, the feedback the sales people gathered from the customers. And it's a really interesting process to kind of come in on Tuesday. We had no idea what this would look like. There was an idea that somebody had to say, people take a lot of pictures of themselves with sunglasses. It'd be cool if we could show them. Side by side to help them make the process better. And that was the idea. That was it. They came in, they had nothing built and they've been building this literally on the spot throughout each day. And by now we actually have an app with functioning app that they can go through. It's very intuitive to help look at themselves and make the sunglass selection process easier, which is pretty cool to watch. So yesterday the sunglass buyer for Nordstrom came down to check out our progress and she happened to put on polarized glasses and then held up the iPad in Portrait view and was surprised that she couldn't see anything. It was black and we figured out that. Polarization of the iPad running up and down and the polarization of the glasses running vertical canceled each other out. You don't see anything. But if you turn the iPad to landscape and you see perfectly fine because of the polarization of the two items line up and it's OK. So it was pretty good fines to be in the store. And she just happened to put on polarized glasses. And so today, first thing we're going to do is switch it to a landscape design and then lock in the aspect ratio of the iPad so customers and sales people just naturally pick it up and use it in landscape and not try and go to portrait. OK, so I'm going to. Show you what we've been working on the last five days. We've added quite a few features over the week. You take a picture, multiple pictures of the customer and then you can pull them up and tap the first one. You can see it larger and then tap the 2nd and do a side by side comparison of each glass next to each other. We also added a feature where you can rename the picture because we heard from salespeople, customers trying on quite a lot of glasses. It's helpful to be able to know what order they were taken in and also rename if you want with the brand or some. Distinguishing feature about the glass. Another feature we added was the ability to zoom in, zoom in and really get a good detailed look at the frame side by side. Also you'll see one of the pictures larger. If you want to just better view of 1 frame, you can flip the camera view as well face it forward. So the salesperson could take a picture of it like this. Or you can flip the camera. So take a picture of yourself facing forward and then at the end of it all we have a button called new customer. Which just erases all of the images and allows the salesperson to start with a new customer. We're just trying to put the final touches on the app tell talk to a lot of users and they said that when we went into the compare view, it was unclear where the pictures were coming from and which picture was which. So the animation here is trying to solve that problem, make it a little more clear what's going on. One of the challenges with software is when you're done, right? And I think the answer is really it depends on how much time you have. At least the most important things got done. So this was time Box 2 a week and we did a week's worth of work. And it seems like what we have now is something that makes customers happy and addresses the main problems and something that we can track, we have metrics on. So I think we're going to call that a day. The application has developed so far. Everything's finished, everything that we've asked for and even the little roadblocks and glitches that we kind of stumbled across as we use the app during the week has been solved. I think that it's going to be a really easy to be able to implement into our sale and I think that we're going to find a lot of success with application whether it's via a selling tool for us. Or if it goes public, into a downloadable format. Whatever happens, I think this was generally quite a success.

[@athaleta]

Very cool ilustration of agile work. And by the way, that's the app I didn't know I would need :D Great job!

[@jamessandford5435]

You guys were pioneers!! 2013! How cool! 😀👍

[@benplayseverything]

Your team delivered a mirror.

[@talon1084]

The video is CLEARLY about more than what the final product achieves. Besides, they only had a week to create something from scratch and I think they had an excellent approach to the project

[@manishsanghavi9724]

@@talon1084 Its 7 year old video. Do they still have similar app? Do any other stores have similar app?

[@wreckgar23]

A mirror that remembers

[@pascalecake]

who hurt you? lol

[@TheMVJunior]

And IG is a photo album, and Facebook is a scholar photo album with an agenda, and google search its that friend that "knows" everything... 🤡

[@amberlake5753]

Still one of my favorite case studies in 2021 :)

[@Tenacious_Lolade]

In 2022 too :)

[@albertolanda]

Couldn't that specific "problem" be solved with a mirror? Or just by having the customer use their own camera and compare as many pictures as they want? I mean, I get the point that the team is trying to make... it's just that it was such a "no problem" case.

[@SivaKumar89]

It's easier to compare on the iPad than on your phone. The app had to be optimised to help users compare their appearances side-by-side, and most features would come out in favour of photo comparison. That's not something that your phone's default gallery app is built for.

[@TheMVJunior]

I agree that it wasn't a real problem case. There are a lot of workarounds just to solve that possibility of seeing yourself with your sunglasses. But that's the point, agility and business aren't driven ONLY by problems. That's a premature and too problem guided view, in real life, business is always looking for ways to increase its values. So, How a sunglass store increases its values? Selling more sunglasses. How does this new app could do this? Imagine, offering your customers a complete history of your sunglasses that you tried (or that you liked), imagine comparing side by side when you have 3 favorites but budget for only one. Imagine that you can offer save your customer sunglasses history that he bought (will it be easier to offer new sunglasses based in which they already liked before?), Imagine being able to try sunglasses in your customer photo, and maybe design your new models guided by this... Can you see beyond the surface now?

[@js8506-v4v]

I agree with @Alberto Landa - explaining the Product Goal would be helpful to understand the value ;) What real problems need to be solved - should the new app + iPad replace a regular mirrow in the offline shop? It is rather a demonstration for programming of a simple app in a noisy environment to promote the agency. And I don't really see a benefit for the onsite software development in this case - the software developers need to concentrate to produce a really valuable piece of software (instead of some interactive mockups).

[@Tenacious_Lolade]

@@TheMVJunior Amazing explanation

[@Tenacious_Lolade]

@@js8506-v4v The developers were there to ensure instant changes were done there and then which worked out eventually. Also it was an existing app not built from scratch. Do you get it now?

[@basenkem2235]

Agile at its best... Nicely done.

[@neeraj.shinde]

Bravo!!! A good case study and example of What is Agile Really About

[@Soulo_Sreeni]

ok , who are here from the udemy scrum training ?😅

[@Eat-O-meter]

Me too

[@schweizer93]

no :)

[@oluwawemimowinifreddeborah]

[@lovishgoyal2814]

me too

[@PhuongNguyen-xk2zs]

hello haha

[@jaceylynnprintup2726]

This video is continously relevant even 2 years after I saw it, originally.

[@m-media8257]

Who else preparing for psm/pspo?

[@leonardosikat7339]

Me, for the psm

[@incremint7009]

me for PSM ☺

[@wallyceebee]

A nice case study story. But, disappointing that this video is not Closed Captioned. Lost value.

[@DanielCeillan]

Customer collaboration, well understood... bravo!

[@ShrutiPol]

wow! cool work with real customer f/b

[@DwayneND]

who else from Product Owner learning path? :)

[@1SandroRocha]

Женя Ф Sure! ; )

[@MattijsKattouw]

Yep.

[@indiranss739]

Practical Implementation with ground reality in action. No Castles in the Air, making Buildings on the Land with opportunities to experience. Agile with nil chances to be Fragile

[@jakegoldman4511]

What happened next?!

[@MO-hh7tr]

Wowwww 🎉…focusing on high value increment&essentials that is based on customers feedback…building ta Done product incrementally…

[@zzh315]

So is it agile or is it incremental mini waterfall?

[@centersforadaptivewarfight1698]

We're here because of Scrum Inc.

[@yuvrajpardeshi1429]

Excellent Video!

[@wmellaart]

Great video, thnx for sharing!

[@rhonabryant7934]

Very nice!

[@sundarseeniraj7594]

Team work - Agile

[@madimakes]

My old crew!

[@ivisempresaria6936]

brasileiro?

[@cocomat1977]

omg this app is really usless

[@juliaruthless5702]

hahaha I had the same thought... at first. And while its definitely useless to me (I buy a rando pair for no more than $15 every few years) if you think about the client, a Nordstrom shopper with the money to afford it and the desire for the luxury experience of having someone shop with them and compare numerous styles, it makes sense for the business to have that as an extra oomph to their service. Still silly to me, but to Barbra looking to drop $300 on some sunglasses... I'd think that client would be all about it!

[@sahils007in]

Loved it !!

[@TheOathOfHorkos]

They went and spent a week not being able to improve on a mirror

[@ntombihadebe3309]

Hahaha my thoughts exactly. I asked myself: "Had mirrors stopped working"? An unnecessary invention

[@HumbleCoderRahul]

Nice