Download Case STUDY

In 2013, the Home Connections project was part of a larger strategic shift under CEO Hubert Joly's Renew Blue transformation — repositioning Best Buy from commodity electronics retailer to trusted advisor in the Connected Home.

​​​​

• Strategic Priority: The company identified internet, TV, and home connectivity as a critical growth category. A customer who needed help navigating ISP choices was someone Best Buy could serve better than Amazon could.

• Scale: By end of 2014, Best Buy had deployed dedicated Connected Home sections in 400 of its 1,050 stores. Home Connections was the digital tool that made that human expertise scalable.

 

PROBLEM

As Manager, CX Design on the Home Connections project, I inherited a mid-stream initiative with real assets — a CX strategy, a shared screen concept, upstream research findings — but no design execution and no clear path to delivery. Requirements were still in flux, stakeholders across merchandising, services, digital, and operations had competing priorities, and the November 2012 in-store research findings were on the table but unacted on.

​

SOLUTION

I managed two UX designers responsible for all design execution — from early wireframes through final hi-fi prototypes. We built the experience around a shared in-store screen where associates and customers navigated options together: entering the customer's address to authenticate local availability, comparing providers across speed tiers and pricing, and working through bundle options side by side. Design decisions were shaped directly by the research findings: price needed context before it appeared, educational content needed to be woven into the flow, progress indicators needed to make the multi-step qualification feel bounded rather than open-ended, etc.

​

IMPACT

The experience shipped on time across hundreds of store locations as part of Best Buy's Connected Home rollout — a deployment at a scale where design inconsistency would have been immediately visible and costly. During this period, Best Buy's NPS improved over 300 basis points year-over-year, with leadership citing store experience as a key driver. Services revenue has held at $2.3–2.5B annually in the decade since. The modern Best Buy Home Connections experience — a guided wizard still live on bestbuy.com — is a direct descendant of this work.

The experience launched as part of Best Buy's Connected Home rollout — a Renew Blue priority identified as central to the company's services strategy. During this period, Best Buy's NPS improved over 300 basis points year-over-year, with leadership citing store experience as a key driver. Services revenue has held at $2.3–2.5B annually in the decade since.

​

KEY LEARNINGS

Inheriting a mid-stream project means the first job is triage, not redesign — knowing what to preserve, what to fix, and what to let go. At scale, design inconsistency is a product failure: designing for hundreds of associates with different training levels and store configurations pushed every decision toward clarity over cleverness. And in a complex stakeholder environment, shipping on time with a small team isn't separate from the design work. It's evidence of it.