Best Buy
Year
2020
My role
- Senior UX Manager
What I did
- Discovery and strategy
- UX design vision
- Product team coordination
- Directing design resources
- Coordinating research needs
One App. Every Tool. Zero Hassle. Welcome to Best Buy Connect.
At Best Buy, getting through a workday meant battling a mess of disconnected tools — and needing a company network just to check your schedule. We knew employees deserved better: instant access to everything they need, wherever they are.
Our solution? One app. One doorway. Everywhere they go.
Project Summary
- Developed the initial design strategy for a dedicated employee app experience.
- Unified 50+ fragmented internal tools into one seamless, accessible starting point for employees.
- Led workshops with stakeholders and legal to define the app’s name and shape its marketing strategy.
- Directed design teams to scale the app company-wide, delivering real-time COVID-19 updates and compliance tools.
- Built a team of amazing people who continue to do great things 🚀
Evolving the
employee experience
When I became an employee of Best Buy in fall of 2019, I had already spent a three combined years as a consultant working on e-commerce and leading work on the internal tools teams. With the increased scope of my new Senior UX Manager title, I was a founding member of a new initative called Future Work Force. It was focused on a very lofty goal statement:
Make Best Buy the best place to work.
Note that it’s not be a best place to work, or even one of the best places to work. No. Our task was to be at the top of the list. Like I said; lofty.
And then
the world stopped
Another product I led was the Employee App (we weren’t that clever with our names). It accomplished things that Best Buy store employees had been requesting: access to schedules, assigned tasks, and internal sales tools on their personal device. It was a small project, but quietly built a devoted user base.
When COVID19 shut down our stores, Best Buy needed a method of communicating constantly evolving changes. The existing Employee App was slowly gaining numbers, but had a very minimal set of features. We decided to fold the Employee App into the Future Work Force vision to become THE communication and access hub for all Best Buy employees.
Let’s try and make Best Buy the safest place to work.
Key learnings
- People are scared – they need to know what support they have
- Legacy systems – find a path to modernize the entry point
- Meet them where they are – access what they need when they need it
- Rapid accuracy – information needs to be immediately available
Sample of discovery and strategy documentation
Research documentation samples to validate and support the strategy
Initial design concept wireframe samples
Keeping people safe And the business moving
With the design strategy emerging, we moved ahead with evolving the Employee App to include COVID screening features according to the latest CDC guidance. My team worked quickly to bring a concept to life that could be rapidly developed and deployed. This immediately provided employees in both stores and corporate an easier way to do daily check-ins created a safer environment for everyone.
The daily COVID screener became a requirement for all employees before reporting to a shift. Employee App usage went from 15% to 100% usage immediately. The time was right to begin implementing the full rollout of our new design strategy.
A new direction needs a new identity
In addition to leading the discovery and design of the evolution of our Employee App, it was also an opportunity to create a new brand identity. Working with leadership and our legal team, I narrowed the field of names to a handful of choices. With access to such a large pool of talented designers, it only made sense to create an internal design competition for the logo. We were spoiled for choice with so many great submissions, but in the end: only one could emerge victorious.
Hello, Connect
In the end, Best Buy Connect was the winner. The name was cleared by legal, and the logo was selected from the dozens of entries. With a strong identity, the next step was socializing our vision to executive leaders.
High fidelity Sketch design samples
Project Outcome
Empowered employees with access to job related tools anywhere.
Creating a “best place to work” required closing the gap between Best Buy and other large organizations. Particularly in empowering employees with tools that supported everyday tasks like completing required trainings, requesting time off, and checking their schedules. Crucially, these tools needed to be accessible on their personal devices. While COVID accelerated the need for mobile access, especially with the introduction of the daily health screener that drove usage of Connect to nearly 100%, it was the broader strategy of enabling off-the-clock access that ultimately made the platform indispensable. This shift gave employees greater autonomy and contributed to a more effective and satisfying work experience.
A strategy of consolidation pays off.
Our guiding concept of “one door leads to many rooms” made Best Buy Connect a scalable solution capable of integrating a wide range of systems without costly refactoring. For external tools that supported it, the app seamlessly redirected users through their stored credentials via the device’s browser. Rather than relying on scattered URLs or hard-to-remember access points, employees now had a single, consistent answer to the question, “Where can I find that?”—it’s in Best Buy Connect.
About Tim
Tim Wilsie is a UX and product designer with 15+ years of crafting intuitive, joyful, and even fun products and digital experiences for e-commerce, video games, and more. He is an avid contributor to open source projects, and co-creator of the Zaparoo platform that bridges digital collections to physical objects. He’s often found speaking about design, art, games, and their intersections.