A Virtual Assistant that Elevates Your Online Shopping Experience

Students: Lily Rosencrantz, Katie Yang, Alice Li, Augustina Ao Liu
Project sponsored by:  Nordstrom

Video here »

Our team worked with Nordstrom with the goal of improving their online shoppers’ customer experience, which we ultimately did through designing a chatbot virtual assistant. We had to abruptly pivot our project from focusing on the in-store Nordstrom shopping experience to online; in doing so, we wanted to understand what makes Nordstrom’s in-store experience so exceptional, so we could adapt it to the online store. We did many rounds of research in the forms of surveys, informal interviews, and structured interviews to understand what makes Nordstrom special, how customers think and shop, and what their current pain points were. After conducting our research and iterating on multiple ideas, we did three rounds of prototyping and evaluation that resulted in our final chatbot design that helps customers with a few main frustrations: quickly accessing customer support, requesting additional information about a product, searching by image, and having a quick view to see available sizes while browsing. In our concept testing session and usability sessions, our participants validated that our chatbot is desirable and delightful, and is an innovative approach to making the customer experience feel special, even while online shopping.