GameStop Extra

SITUATION

Gamestop wanted to move one step closer to a “Store of the future”.

Understanding the limitations of the locations, the existing in-store experience, and the audience was essential for their retail experience.

RESEARCH

The research process involved visiting a large sample of sites to get the best idea of what the interactions looked like between customer and advisor as busy times, and off times. What sort of information was exchanged, and what sort of stimuli was competing for attention.

Interviews with the game advisors gave us qualitative data such as:

The audio from GameStopTV was polarizing and fell on a spectrum somewhere between a welcome background noise and a constant annoyance.
The advisors would generally step in and act as the expert if they saw customers searching on their personal devices for gameplay or reviews of certain titles.
The most frequent purchases were new releases followed by more nostalgic titles.

Our observations showed us that shoppers had 3 main approaches to finding the game they wanted:

Exploring – For customers that knew what they liked and wanted more similar experiences
Searching – For customers that knew exactly what they wanted and wanted to get in and out.
Browsing – For customers that didn’t know exactly what they wanted and would consider multiple titles along the way to making a decision.

With these data points in mind, we crafted our solution, mixing a bit of nostalgia and true utility.

Journey map discovery showed there was plenty of room for improvement within the retail location. The concept to create a kiosk was born from the needs of a shopper as they traversed the store.

SOLUTION

The solution proposed opportunities to have the most relevant real-time content that was specific to the store location, custom for the game advisors, and was to serve as both an assisted sales tool and self-service.

Before Interaction

The kiosk could provide frequently updated recommendations of the local advisors favorite games, serve up truly dynamic promotions, most valuable buy backs, hard sell the loyalty program, as well as provide some on-boarding for using the kiosk.

During Interaction

When a user either touched the screen, or inserted a game case into the “console” browsing, searching, and exploratory options would be displayed to allow the customer to pursue their game buying journey in the manner they wanted.

Relevant gameplay, screenshots, platform, pricing and similar titles would all be displayed allowing a customer to reach decisions or a game advisor to help sell new, or lesser known titles.

Caution: Audio will play

RESULTS

A 40 store pilot was the intent of the project, but was indefinitely put on hold by the client after a change of management. However, an initial prototype did go through validation from customers and game experts, and was received extremely well, prior to cancellation.