Establishing Design Consensus toward Next-Generation Retail: Data-Enabled Design Exploration and Participatory Analysis

Abstract

Integration of online and offline retail faces challenges in technology adoption, interaction style evolution and customer behavior shifts, while also being complicated by diverse perspectives from different stakeholders of consumers, retail staff, and retail business unit people. To explore how we can tackle the aforementioned challenges, this work applied the data-enabled design method and participatory data analysis to a case study, where 400 student consumers’ shopping behavior data was collected, cross-analyzed, and visualized in a campus chain store. We then invited 13 stakeholders to join a co-creation workshop for a further participatory data analysis. In the workshop, the different stakeholders came to a design consensuses which we summarized into a series of practical design recommendations for improving the current store. Finally, we generalized the case study process as a contextual-informed-aware model, which can contribute to professional design practice for the retail industry.