The LG Experience wall is located in hundreds of Best Buy locations across the country. The 24-foot wall allows shoppers to compare LG’s latest OLED and Super UHD TVs, along with several sound bars, through an interactive touchscreen tablet. The goal of the tablet is to aid Best Buy sales associates in driving sale conversations by allowing them to control the content on the wall via demonstrations best suited to the consumer’s needs. In the picture below, the center section of the console contains the tablet that can control the wall of TVs.

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LG, in partnership with the Sandbox Agency and other vendors, had already released a first version of the wall experience to Best Buy. The tablet had a few video demonstrations programmed into it, but there was an opportunity for enhanced content, and there were a few usability issues with the flow of the first version interface. The team also noticed a lot of exits from the demos while analyzing the display metrics. I was brought into the wall project’s second version to help design a new interface for the control tablet. Here is an example screen of the TV menu from the tablet’s first version:

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Discovery Step 1 – To get myself up to speed on this project, I went into a Best Buy store that had the LG wall experience and interacted with all of the possible screens. I did the same for competitive walls as well, such as Samsung’s and Sony’s, and I also talked to a Best Buy rep about his experiences with each of the walls.  The Sandbox strategy team had also done extensive research prior to my joining the project, which I combed through to understand the TV selling and buying experience in Best Buy stores.

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Discovery Step 2 – After understanding the research behind the wall as a selling tool, I next wanted to understand what the usability issues were with the current tablet experience. I read through several aggregated analytics reports on interaction behavior from the tablets in stores, and also performed a quick heuristic evaluation on the tablet’s interface. I used Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design as the baseline and determined that predictability and contextual information were the biggest issues for the tablet’s first version. A few excerpts from my evaluation report are shown below:

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Design  – Once I had a good understanding of the research that had been conducted and the existing usability concerns, I started to sketch out some concepts for the next version, making sure to incorporate insights from discovery. I then put a prototype together and went through multiple iterations and reviews with the design team. In the prototype concept designs I made sure to account for interaction predictability, so users always knew when something would play on the wall TVs, and a recommendation for contextual information so users understood why they might be interested in a particular demo. Concepts also included increased control of the experience so Best Buy reps or consumers could pause content and adjust volume as needed during their interactions with the wall.

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The final visual design (created by Sandbox designers Josh Liotta and Robben Roelser) is shown below. The updated version contains an ever-present side menu, a predictable video control UI, adjustable volume controls, and additional contextual information for each of the demos. The new version of the tablet launched in the summer of 2017 into hundreds of Best Buy stores around the country.

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