Colleen:I choose the jobs that I work in because I want to make sure that the work I'm doing is something that's close to my heart, and Nike is one of those clients.
My name is Colleen Miller, and I'm an Experience Design Director here at R/GA Portland. R/GA is a global company and I think that's one of the big highlights of R/GA, is we have a giant connected network. In Portland we work specifically with one client: Nike.
We're trying to enhance the online experience and we're also trying to enhance the retail experience. Online, we're trying to bring smart educational tools to make the purchase process a little bit easier and eliminate returns. And then on the retail side, we're trying to bring more than just the purchase of a shoe, because we know that anyone can buy a shoe at any website. What are the experiences that bring someone into the store, and how does that relationship with the Athlete, who is the customer service representative for Nike... how can they help basically seal the deal.
Colleen:One of the first projects that I worked on here at R/GA was some Athlete tools. It was a toolkit of mobile products for retail experiences at Nike.
What we do with the Athlete tools in mobile—in the mobile design process—is to make sure that whatever we do really gets out of the way of the experience; the one-to-one, face-to-face experience that's happening between a customer that comes in and the athlete who's working from the Nike side. So we did some things like making buttons intentionally large and bulky, and try to make things like really close, low taps, you know, quick access. One of our philosophies was tap, not type.
It was a way for us to really work retail experience and it led to additional work, like service design projects that happen within the retail space, and it also expanded to touchscreens that were across the store that offered additional experiences.
Colleen:I think both the online and the in-store experiences are changing. We're working a lot of different services, to the retail model, to make sure that the athletes feel really special when they arrive at the store. The retail experience is transforming past transactional, it's growing into something that is an experience. It's something you're not gonna want to miss.