Innovation and Accessibility: Creating Outstanding Customer Experiences at Target

Innovation and Accessibility: Creating Outstanding Customer Experiences at Target

Braille Monitor
November 2015

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Innovation and Accessibility: Creating Outstanding Customer Experiences at Target
by Alan Wizemann
From the Editor: With players such as Google and Microsoft at the seventy-fifth convention, one would expect to hear exciting news about technology, but one of the most exciting presentations focusing on accessibility and technology came from a retailer. At one time we found it necessary to engage Target in the courts to get them to address accessibility, but today their efforts represent some of the most innovative and forward-looking efforts to be found in the country. Target has embraced accessibility as a critical customer service, and this is clear by their actions in hiring a quality team and the way that team is embraced by the corporate culture of Target. Here is what Alan Wizemann said to the convention on Friday, July 10:
Thanks very much. That's great applause, and you don't even know what I'm going to talk about yet.

I appreciate that. I have to say that I'm pretty honored to be up here: not only to be part of what we're trying to do at Target for accessibility, but to also be part of this panel and the speakers that are here today—I'm a technologist who works with a retailer, and to be on the same stage with Ray Kurzweil and politicians is pretty humbling, so thank you for the opportunity.

But more than that, to see an organization like this that can crush world records and take down problems of companies the size of Apple is pretty impressive. Today, I'm really here to talk about how Target treats innovation and accessibility, and we're really about creating outstanding customer experiences. We refer to our users or anybody who interacts with our company as guests. You'll hear me use that phrase a lot in this.

First, let me give you a sense of the size of Target: we're a $70 billion company, with 350,000 employees, powering 1,800 stores that service 30 million guests a week, just in the United States. Digitally, with Target.com and our mobile apps, we serve and handle over 2 billion user sessions a year. We have stores within three miles of 95 percent of the US population, and our brand promise, which hopefully you've heard before, is "Expect more. Pay less." Now when I found out that the slogan of the NFB was "Live the life you want," I immediately thought of our brand promise, "Expect more. Pay less." Especially the "expect more" part. It's my job to empower my teams to deliver on that promise and to make sure that we're building experiences that fulfill the needs and fuel the potential of our guests. That is our internal, foundational mission statement as a company.

When I started doing research into this presentation, something really funny happened. When we build presentations internally, we actually deal with several different parts of our company. They asked to see a visual slide presentation—which told me that we have a lot to learn internally as a company about how to treat accessibility. What I also learned, though, is how many people can be affected. According to the research that I've done, and confirmed by the National Center for Health Statistics, 20.6 million adults in the United States have experienced vision loss or impairment. When we couple that with an aging population of baby boomers, there's actually a significant total addressable new market for us to lead in. It's a large opportunity for not only growth and revenue, but it's also just the right thing to do. Target prides itself on being an inclusive and diverse culture, and for us not to support an entire segment of the population just doesn't fit with our mission as a company. [Applause] But more importantly, we want to lead. We want to set the standard of what it truly means to be accessible. We don't feel it's right to change experiences or remove features for any guest, regardless of their abilities. Everyone should be able to experience Target the way we want them to be able to experience it: all the same. And to do that, we needed to hire accordingly.

We've built a world-class accessibility team that deals with issues and opportunities of the population that we want as guests. Many of our accessibility team members are blind and use assistive technology on a day-to-day basis in their work. Some of the team are actually here today, and I'm not only proud of what they've helped us accomplish; I'm proud of their continued efforts to drive this exciting work across our company. I'm actually hoping—if you don't mind—that we can give them a round of applause. [Applause] They definitely deserve that and more.

At Target one thing I've realized in the eighteen months I've been there is that we had to change the rules. When I started, accessibility was really viewed as compliant; it was a checkbox before we released something to our guests. Our engineers did not like handling it. It became a hurdle. What we needed was something that would be treated differently—a positive change.

What we've done is just made it part of what we do. We've empowered teams to think of new ways to design, test, and build our products for all of our guests, rewarding teams that help us lead in this important guest segment. It has also become a really proactive use of resources within our company. Engineers are now actively building for accessibility and understanding its true value and that it is core to our guests’ mission. The great news is that it's working. We're seeing significant accessibility work across all of our experiences.

Recently our teams demonstrated some really neat changes to some of our Target.com activities properties such as selecting a store. What we didn't realize until we saw that through actual assistive technologies was that it was incredibly difficult. So they took it on their own to build new experiences with our accessibility team to make that easy.

In the past three years we have decreased our accessibility issues by 400 percent. We are aiming for zero issues across all of our platforms. [Applause]

To show a small example of this, I looked at the last test run that we did of our homepage. We compare these tests to several of our closest competitors. Target had six minor issues. Although we were going to address them, I wanted to see what our competitors had. Our closest one had 170. Now these results are from automated testing, and we use that as an indicator of our own success, but it's not the only indicator. We do heavy manual testing to represent what our guests' actual experiences are, and we train our internal and external partners to test with assistive technology across all of our guest experiences. Now our team has made this a priority, to not only inform, but instruct and maintain some of the highest standards of the industry. But we're also teaching these practices as we go. We think there is massive room for improvement, and we're constantly conducting user research and usability testing to incorporate the widest range of Target guests, including users of assistive technologies.

Here's where we need your help. If anyone here is interested in performing usability research for Target or would like to give our accessibility team some feedback, feel free to reach us anytime at <[email protected]>, or catch our team members here at the convention. You can help us reach our goal and show the industry why others should treat accessibility as a priority. Because as we compare ourselves with our competition, part of leading the industry, an important part, is to help others understand the unique challenges we faced, tools we used, and practices we have established to help the accessible community. We have already supported companies across several industries and even a few of our own competitors. With this work and the work across all of our teams, we're bringing accessibility to a national conversation. Every developer that works with us, every contractor we hire, learns about accessibility and our commitment. They take that knowledge with them, which means over time we will actually help shape an industry far beyond our own walls. [Applause] Our teams of engineers are excited. We're exploring the development of our own tools that we can opensource and release to the communities.

But there's one very big number that I want you to take away from our presentation here, and that's 100 percent. Our goal at Target is for all our guests' experiences to be 100 percent accessible, regardless of device. That is the mandate I gave our teams and what we strive for every day. I'm also hopeful that this mission will start to spread, not only across our company, but into our stores to create exciting experiences for all our guests and jobs for the community.

So here's what we're doing to make that happen: we've been developing an accessible, adaptive web platform. Currently if you're using Target.com on any device, you're actually using three different codebases. It makes changing our experiences incredibly difficult. It also makes testing, tracking, and fixing accessibility issues harder work than it needs to be. Later this year and early next year we'll be transferring all of our platforms that power our mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences to this new, single platform that adapts to the device you are using, making it easier to attain our accessibility goals [Applause].

We're not just stopping with the web. Our mobile applications are some of the most accessible in the industry, but we also want to do more. We want to make sure that we can leverage every tool at our disposal to bring our experiences to life, whether they're used outside—or more importantly—inside our stores. By combining different types of navigation using beacons, voice, and more, we are slowly unlocking more ways to experience Target. We just announced a new product called Target Run, which is available in fifty of our stores as a test, using location beacons and different navigation to guide someone through a store based on items in their shopping list and tell them where they are when they're there. [Applause]

We also know we can't do it all, so we're partnering with new and innovative technologies that we find. We've recently partnered with a company called Conversant Labs, that's actually here today, on the launch of their new mobile application, Say Shopping, to leverage their capability with Target to deliver our entire assortment in a new and exciting way—through speech. This new conversational shopping technology will provide a quality accessible experience and also help identify new shopping capabilities to satisfy the needs of all our guests. And I am proud that they announced the launch of this application for this convention, and it's available right now on the app stores. [Applause]

One of the most exciting things, however, about dealing with innovation and technology is the future of wearable devices. I personally think that wearable devices have the potential to be world-changing technologies for accessibility. If one of the most important parts about blindness is access to information, this has the potential to be one of the biggest advancements we've seen in a generation by giving us never-before-experienced levels of that information. We are currently testing multiple wearable platforms like the Apple Watch to see if we can unlock new features and capabilities across our digital portfolio that will allow our disabled guests to build lists, find products, and navigate our stores without any assistance. [Applause, cheers] Although widespread adoption of these technologies is probably a couple years away from being mainstream, we're investing the time now to make sure we're at the forefront of these potential use cases. If you've seen the news this week, we just launched our Open House, a place in San Francisco where people can actually experience what we call the connected home, which uses many different assistive devices across new and exciting innovation companies showing how you can use different technologies for sale at Target within your house.

But being a retailer, our mission is just to get our guests what they want, when they want it, and where they want it. It's a remarkably easy statement, but an unbelievably complex set of processes, technologies, and partners are here to make that happen. We're experimenting with multiple fulfillment options to allow us to deliver on that promise, and accessibility is part of the decision criteria that we use to introduce, test, and ultimately deploy these to our guests. From curbside delivery, we are rapidly expanding to deliver on that promise.

That brings me to my final point and the reason I'm here today, which is all about innovation. Innovation is key to driving change across our digital properties, our stores, and our company. We feel that there is a place for an innovative accessibility team to help identify, prototype, and deliver innovative ideas to help unlock this large and growing guest segment. From augmented reality through audio and touch technologies, to partnering on driverless cars and digital guides, we want to always be on the cutting edge to make sure that everyone, regardless of their abilities, can experience Target. So expect more, a lot more. Thank you.

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