If you’ve been shopping lately, you know that finding the right item in the right place at the right time can be a hit-or-miss experience. Everyone has experienced going to a store for the perfect item, and either:
- Not being able to find it,
- Learning it’s out of stock, or
- Finding it in the wrong place.
We wander around the aisles, looking for someone who knows where the item is, and becoming more and more frustrated as we go.
To prevent this frustration, retailers are using indoor smart mapping technologies tied to inventory management and built into a mobile application. Whether these apps leverage iBeacons or another kind of location technology, smart maps are poised to be the next big thing in retail mobile applications.
If they work.
Retail giant Target recently rolled out a highly publicized indoor mapping component to its app, promising to lead shoppers directly to the items they’re looking for, right on the shelf. We tested this indoor mapping feature, and guess what?
Even for multibillion-dollar retailers, this stuff isn’t easy.
Good News: Dynamic Content, Beautiful Map
There’s good news: Target’s app gets some things right.
It’s easy enough to load up a shopping list, which seems to be a primary use case. Aisle information populates once you get near the store. This is a great feature—dynamic loading of relevant, store-specific information is exactly what any shopper wants.
The maps in the app are pretty good as well. They’re clearly labeled and you can get oriented to the store layout and key areas with a couple pinches and zooms.
Bad News: Frustrating UX
Unfortunately, this app has some problems. First, it isn’t responsive. Tapping on map elements often does…nothing. Sometimes our reviewer had to tap 10-12 times to get a response from the app. Since the app dynamically loads information, it’s dependent on signal strength and application responsiveness.
The app’s indoor wayfinding function also had issues. Here’s our reviewer’s report from the field, where he was trying to use the app to find shoelaces.
This is where the magic happens. I’ve entered the venue; I’ve been given a map, and a nice pinpoint showing me exactly where I need to go to get the item. Shoelaces on E18 here I come!
Turns out there are in fact no shoelaces in the pool supply aisle. This was my experience for a good 50% of the other items in my shopping list. Christmas tree lights were not in the shopping cart rows, the X-Men movie was not at the cash register, etc.
Some of the items were wildly off—literally opposite ends of the store. It got deodorant and trash bags correct, but at that point I’d pressed the application buttons a couple hundred times, and walked around the store going to wrong department after another.
It’s safe to say that this kind of maddening shopping trip is probably not what the Target executives had in mind when they conceived of this app. In fact, it’s probably the opposite of the experience they hoped to create.
When an App Does More Harm than Good
Think about this experience from a shopper’s perspective. You’re in the store, using the app, and the app is forcing you to tap unresponsive application buttons repeatedly while walking around the store going to wrong aisle after wrong aisle.
At this stage, most of us would get fed up and close the app. But our reviewer kept experimenting.
It turns out that the app is extremely accurate if (and only if) you do a product search, find the exact product you want, and then add it to your list within the app. There is likely a large gap between Target’s auto-populate search engine and its store inventory system—and the result is a user experience that forces the user to do the heavy lifting.
For our shoelace example, the ideal scenario would be to search for “shoelaces” and be taken directly to the shoelace aisle to make a product selection. But the way the app is set up, shoppers have to know that they want shoelaces made by Acme Brand, search for them specifically, and then use the app to navigate to them. What if you don’t know what brand you want to purchase yet?
There’s no doubt that Target has an incredible inventory management system, but they struggled to connect it to their front-end search engine to make this app really shine. To make matters more baffling, as our reviewer walked through the store, he wasn’t subject to any advanced targeting or promotions. Even in a random aisle, he might have purchased something on impulse if encouraged with a well-timed coupon. Target missed a huge opportunity to market to him.
Missing the Mark (or, You Know…Target)
So far, Target’s implementation doesn’t address the real customer need for a seamless, convenient in-store experience. In fact, the app’s indoor mapping function might introduce more problems than it solves.
Getting this right is really hard. Retailers have to balance user experience with the right back-end capabilities, and it’s very easy to be strong on one and not the other. This is a case where UX problems block users from a positive experience with the app. Recent app marketplace comments seem to reinforce that view—in the past month, negative comments about Target’s app have outweighed positive comments by ten to one.
Target has an amazing opportunity to learn from this experience, fix its app, and use it as a brand booster and advertising tool. Hopefully they’ll take the time to make their mapping feature a leader in retail, instead of something that hampers sales and customer satisfaction.
The post Here’s What Happened When We Test-Drove Target’s New Indoor Mapping App appeared first on Phunware.