Blair McMillan

01 / Case study

uBreakiFix

Deciding how a repair store should work for everyone in it.

Client
uBreakiFix · Store of the Future
Role
Service Strategist · Design Researcher · Workshop Facilitator
A rendering of a redesigned store: a long open work bench, accessory shelving and a patterned brand wall

02 / Four people

One store. Four very different experiences.

There wasn’t one user. A repair store is shared by people who want different things from the same room, and who are in it for very different lengths of time — a customer for twenty minutes, a technician for a whole working day.

So the store couldn’t be designed around the person walking through the door. It had to work for everyone standing behind the counter, at the bench, and paying for the fit-out.

  1. 01

    Customers

    Trust + clarity

  2. 02

    Front-desk staff

    Efficient service + handoffs

  3. 03

    Technicians

    Focus + functional workspace

  4. 04

    Franchisees

    Practicality + repeatability

03 / The tension

The glass wall.

Put a glass wall around the repair area and customers can watch their device being fixed. It reads as openness: nothing hidden, real people doing real work. Customers responded well to it.

Now imagine standing behind that glass for eight hours a day.

What customers wanted

To see what was happening to their device, and know it was in good hands.

What technicians needed

To concentrate on difficult, delicate work without being watched all day.

Both are right.

A good customer-experience decision had just become a bad employee-experience decision, and nobody in the room had been wrong. That tension became the test every idea had to pass.

04 / A system

A system, not a journey.

This is why we ran the research as co-creation labs in cities across the United States, with customers, technicians, front-desk staff and franchise owners in the room together rather than interviewed separately. Participants built, arranged and argued over store concepts themselves.

Separate interviews would have produced four wish lists. Putting the groups in the same room surfaced the places where one group’s improvement was another group’s problem — which is the only thing worth designing around.

Physical space

  1. Customer
  2. Front desk
  3. Technician
  4. Franchisee

Technology

Change one part and you change the others. That was the whole problem.

05 / What we learned

Contradictions, turned into rules.

Across the labs we looked for patterns rather than requests: moments where expectations weren’t met, behaviours that kept repeating, and — most usefully — the conflicts between groups.

The job was to take a large amount of sometimes contradictory material and turn it into something designers and the business could actually make decisions with.

  1. People
  2. Behaviours
  3. Tensions
  4. Design principles
  5. Store experience

  1. 01

    Transparency

    without surveillance

  2. 02

    Efficiency

    without rushing customers

  3. 03

    Consistency

    without ignoring different store realities

  4. 04

    Customer experience

    without sacrificing employee experience

06 / The store

From one store to a system.

The aim was never just a nicer-looking store. The principles decided how the service should run in that space — how a device moves from the front desk to the bench, how much of a repair a customer gets to see, and what a franchisee can repeat from one location to the next.

They fed into concepts and recommendations for the retail experience, and then into how the stores were actually built. This wasn’t research for a speculative concept.

The work bench and accessory wall in detail: an open bench with no counter between staff and customers
The store concept the research fed into: an open bench rather than a counter between staff and customer, and accessories you can look at without asking anyone.
  1. 01 A new design system for uBreakiFix stores nationwide.
  2. 02 A newly designed flagship store in the Chicago area.

Looking back

The customer isn’t always the only user.

Make the store better for one of them at the others’ expense and you haven’t made it better. It had to work as a whole: for the person walking through the door, the person standing behind the counter, the person repairing the device and the person responsible for keeping the store running.