Turning customer's number one problem into a $500m revenue channel
Bunnings Warehouse / AKQA
Bunnings Warehouse / AKQA
Bunnings customers hated how hard it was to find what they were looking for in their huge warehouse-style stores. I led a team of designers, engineers and product owners to develop a solution to this problem, and unlocked two new revenue channels that went on to generate hundreds of millions of dollars.
Bunnings customers' number one problem was finding products in their massive stores. At the same time, team members were spending most of their time guiding customers to product locations, limiting their time for more important work tasks.
Product design lead and strategist – I led a small team of product owners, engineers and researchers to develop and scale a solution. After the launch of an initial app, I then continued to lead design and played a key role in product strategy to launch several updates and a companion app for tradespeople.
I led the core team through a series of rapid design sprints and a live beta trial with 738 customers that included a feedback loop that helped build confidence in before launching. After a successful release, I turned attention to revenue-generating opportunities that dovetailed with genuine customer problems.
After initially being shelved, the app was unexpectedly fast-tracked for release as a COVID-19 tool to minimise contact time between the public and Bunnings team members in their stores. Almost immediately after its release, the Product Finder app hit #1 on the Australian app store for shopping apps and received huge media praise. The app went on to lay the foundations for a mobile ecommerce channel for Bunnings, as well as a hugely successful partner app for professional tradies.
Survey research revealed that customers' number one problem when shopping with Bunnings was finding products in their huge warehouse-style stores. A subsequent Kano study also revealed product finding as Bunnings' top opportunity for CSAT.
A separate study with Bunnings team members revealed that 75% of their time was "wasted" directing customers to product locations in the store. This prevented them from being able to complete more-critical work tasks and from helping customers with their in-depth product knowledge.
An early proof of concept was created using a Messenger bot, which we usability tested in-store. Customers did not find a chatbot solution accessible enough, as they relied heavily on product imagery and the layout of the store when trying to find products.
A Google trends study suggested that customers already expected there to be a Bunnings app. In combination with findings of the the chatbot testing, this suggested that a native app might be a better format to help solve the problem.
After gathering a diverse group of stakeholders who would evolve into the core product team, I led several designs sprints to align on the problem and gather ideas that would inform our early concepts to test.
Lightning demos and crazy 8s style exercises resulted in a few different approaches to trying to solve our goal. Some of our early ideas included image search to help identify niche products, shopping lists to streamline store visits, and an interactive store map, to help with wayfinding in the store.
After aligning on core features through a customer survey and effort vs impact mapping, we started to build our MVP. We chose to build a lean hard-coded prototype, rather than a lo-fi UX prototype, as it allowed us to test using real product and store data.
"This solves the biggest problem I have at Bunnings. It can be very frustrating not just finding what you're looking for, but finding people to ask."
Early into testing, we observed how users typically used imagery and price when cross-referencing products on the screen with those on the shelves. We decided to increase the prominence of these elements to make cross-referencing and navigation easier.
After discovering that we could vectorise individual CAD drawings for each store, we created a tool to map each product to its location in the store. This allowed us to build a new wayfinding tool for customers to navigate the stores and find what they're looking for with ease.
Sentiment analysis with customers helped us to prioritise features for an initial release, which resulted in de-prioritisation of some interesting ideas. An example of this was an object-recognition feature that helped identify and locate difficult-to-name products.
The visual design details of the app naturally leaned into Bunnings' existing digital identity, but also took cues from the in-store environment, to promote a sense of familiarity when navigating the store.
To gain more quantitative insight, we set up a beta trial with over 700 test participants. We recruited participants by directly emailing frequent Bunnings customers with an invitation to sign up to the trial. Participants could leave feedback whenever they wanted via an omnipresent feedback button in the app.
The beta trial was a huge success, and gave us a projected app rating, indication of retention rate and qualitative insights to use moving forward.
Despite the success, the Product Finder app was disappointingly deprioritised, as the company decided to direct all funding towards a new ecommerce re-platform… But thankfully, all was not lost – and news of the COVID-19 pandemic provided the app with new strategic importance.
By repositioning the app as a way to minimise in-store contact time, it became a critical component of Bunnings' essential service strategy: helping secure government permission to keep stores open while competitors were forced to close.
The project was rapidly reprioritised, accelerating our delivery timeline and transforming the app from a customer convenience to a business-critical service that helped Bunnings weather the pandemic while capturing great reviews and media praise.
Rather than integrate a traditional ecommerce funnel (which would risk leading to a duplicate experience of the Bunnings website), I successfully pitched the idea of a location-based app experience, which would recognise if the user was in a store or not and provide the most-relevant experience.
The "in-store design" would preserve the core Product Finder app experience that made it so successful and focus more on helping users find products in the store. The "out of store" design would lean more-heavily towards an online retail experience, allowing users to easily purchase items online.
Following the full launch of the ecommerce functionality, the app has gone on to become an essential part of Bunnings' revenue model while also retaining immensely high customer satisfaction ratings.
Comparisons were quickly drawn at Bunnings between the Product Finder app's reviews and success, and the relatively low performance of their existing PowerPass app: a specialised app for professional tradespeople (tradies).
We decided to rebuild the PowerPass app using the design system and technology developed for Product Finder, but with additional functionality to solve tradies' biggest gripes.
Interviews with tradies suggested that their time spent in the store was a huge problem, typically taking several trips from work sites to Bunnings stores each day, but having to wait in long checkout queues each time.
We created a new experience that allowed them to scan and purchase products from the store all within the app. After purchasing, the app generates a digital receipt to show the store staff upon exit, allowing tradies to completely bypass long checkout lines.
The redesigned PowerPass app was an enormous success, saving tradies countless hours in the store by letting them scan, purchase and get discount all within the app. The app has received over half a million downloads, and generates in excess of of $480million each year.
This was an enormous initiative, and I learned a ridiculous amount in my time spend working on it. My learnings range from stakeholder management through branding application, design systems and feature prioritisation.
Most importantly, I learned the value of maintaining a constant focus on the core problem. When we work in experimental environments with lots of freedom, it's easy to get carried away with cool ideas just because we can.
Maintaining a regular feedback cycle with users – not just for usability, but also for sentiment analysis on features and capabilities – meant that the final product struck an amazing balance between solving a genuine customer need and creating a new successful & scalable revenue opportunity for the business.
If you'd like to get in touch, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, or send me an email at jimmyleslie.design@gmail.com