SnowBird Update: Outlining The Plan To Understand Snowboarding

As we start getting our data from the field, I’d like to take this time to introduce our project goals.

Project Goals

This Frontier Project, Snowbird, aims to produce a product or service prototype that represents a future shopping experience. The research is focused on understanding if technical details that market products dissuade beginners and if so, how beginners overcome them to fulfill a transaction. We chose snowboarding because it offered an interesting arena we were interested in and snow season is just upon us here in Seattle. Our first step required us to understand a few things about snowboarding in general:

Snowboarding culture. Snowboarding culture is fairly distinctive involving unique terminology (jib, pow pow, flex, etc), clothing style, attitudes and values. So to truly understand snowboarding, it was important to ask a store owner and an expert shopper about the lifestyle. We reached out to Snowboard Connection as a collaborator with this project as a way to help ease us into the unknown.

How experts shop. Even though we plan on helping beginners, we needed to learn how they might progress into advanced stages of snowboarding in order to design for a progressive experience.

How beginners shop. We needed to ask the stupid question to be sure we weren’t making any assumptions about their strategies in shopping online vs in store. By recruiting four non-experts, we would have personal stories for our designers in the studio to become inspired by how they currently purchase their equipment and how that compares to the expert approach.

Behaviors of in store shoppers. Our goal here involved cataloging the positive and negative qualities of the in store experience for reference, as well as identifying differences between snowboarding shops. Shadowing shoppers in store gave us an idea of the different types of interactions that happen in store vs online. We also wanted to observe how a specialty store like Snowboard Connection compared to larger retailers like REI. Both companies are successful in enabling their customers to make informed decisions, but they are certainly different in their environment.

Behaviors of online shoppers. We set out to understand where the bar is set for snowboarding sites. We have already identified the disconnect between product sites like K2 and Burton with retailers like Snowboard Connection, but how that impacts the final transaction is still unknown. We have also noticed that apparel shopping is on the rise while equipment sales have slowed. We not only want to learn why, but if it means a shift in motivations: fashion vs recreation?

Approach

Ethnographic Video. One of the most challenging parts of this project is the inclusion of video recording. We really wanted to step it up with video and audio and so we acquired some new tools to help us along the way. There has always been something unfulfilling for us at Artefact to report on what the people have shared with us in the field. So instead, we want to bring their compelling stories forward by leveraging best practices from film producers.

Deliverables

Themes and Requirements. Once we’ve collected all the hand-written notes and hours of tape, we can reduce the chaos through an affinity exercise. The outcome will help focus us on the more obvious areas where shopping experiences differ, reveal pain points in the process, and also provide us with a shared understanding.

Customer Profiles. While we can generalize our findings to help understand the insights we will have uncovered, being able to dive back into the gritty details of just one person makes designing for a solution a little more tangible. As part of the process in experimenting with different ways of sharing research, the next few posts will be covering individual customer profiles in greater detail regarding their experiences both online and in store.

First up, I’d like to introduce you to John Logic, one of the store owners of Snowboard Connection.