[MUSIC]
>> I'm JB Brown, the Nordstrom Innovation 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 that 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 work.
So that we were never working on anything that wasn't valued by the customer,
and only doing things that are creating value.
So, we'll be building a feature, and testing until we
get to the point, where we have something that's good
enough, that we can just leave, and 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 a software team shows up and builds an application in
[SOUND]
a surprise location.
This is a Nordstrom Innovation Lab, and we're at the flagship
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store in downtown Seattle.
Right now the team is just setting up their equipment to get started, and 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
[NOISE]
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 a user story map.
So we're going, going to sit here and together outline all the steps
that a customer would take and actually even beforehand how they buy sunglasses.
Like what are the, the different things that they might do?
And how that process might change, if we have this application.
>> And we 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 Innovation Lab.
It's a great way to show, what we'd like to do, and 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 Tel with bring the prototype
to a customer and say, okay, 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, take the picture.
All right.
And then, I want to compare it to this other
pair I've got right here.
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Put these on.
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Clicking on the picture, I can just pull these
up like this, and see which one I like better.
>> While telling Kim, I've been talking to people
and different prototypes, we've been coding, building an iPad.
We take a stab at something.
We look at paper prototypes that Kim put together.
We might take one at a time.
Usually, we come to the board and
[SOUND]
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've delivered four or five different separate features.
And I deliver it, swap the iPad with Tel.
She'd go and talk to a customer, and ten minutes later,
I had feedback from real customers about this thing that I delivered.
And it changed how we did the the next thing.
>> And it's been a really, really great watching day today, 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 the
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, a functioning app, that they can go
through, it's very intuitive, to help look
at themselves, and make the sunglasses selection
[LAUGH]
process easier, which is pretty cool to watch.
>> So yesterday, the sunglasses 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 because it was black.
And we figured out that polarization of the iPad running up and
down and the polarization of the glasses running vertical cancelled each other out.
You don't see anything.
But if you turn the iPad to Landscape,
[SOUND]
you see it perfectly fine, because the polarization
of the two items line up and it's okay.
So it was a pretty good find, to be in
a 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 to go to Portrait.
>> Okay, 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 pull them up.
Tap the first one.
Can see it larger, and then tap the second.
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 sales people, if a customer's
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.
You can zoom in and really get a good detailed look at the frames side by side.
Also, you'll see one of the pictures larger if
you want just a better view of one frame.
You can flip the camera view as well.
Face it forward so that the sales person can take a
picture of it like this, or you can flip the camera so,
take a picture
[LAUGH]
of yourself facing forward.
And at the end of it all, you have a button called New Customer, which just
erases all of the images and allows the sales person to start with a new customer.
>> We're just trying to put the final touches on the app.
Tel talked 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 to make sure which 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 of software
is when you've done right.
And I think, the answer's really, it depends on how much time you have.
At least the most important things got done.
So, this was time-boxed to 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 used the app during the week, has been solved.
I think that it's going to be 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 is generally
quite a success.