TEAM
Sunny Lee - UX Design
Devansh Garg - Product Management
Justin Morgan - iOS Solutions Architect
Andrew Bradnan - iOS Development
Mike Gourdin - Quality Assurance
Daniele Lanza - Design Director
Dave Kover - Design Systems
Rachel Grossman-Kahn - Accessibility
Adrian Cumming - XD Director
Jasdeep Singh - Sr. Director Engineering
Tanmay Sinha - Product & Engineering Leader of e-commerce
Brian Tilzer - Chief Digital, Analytics & Technology Officer

DURATION
6 weeks

CLIENT
Best Buy

TOOLS
Figma, Photoshop, RealityComposer, and JIRA.

PLATFORMS
iOS: VisionPro and RealityKit

 
 
 

OVERVIEW

Seeking a strategic partnership with Apple, Best Buy leadership, led by Brian Tilzer and Tanmay Sinha, approached our team with the challenge of developing a VisionPro app in 4 weeks.

Our goal was to empower customers with a seamless, immersive shopping experience—allowing them to accurately visualize how a product would look and fit in their space. By making the process engaging, we aimed to inspire customers to shop with confidence and design their ideal environments.

 
 
 

A demo of our v2 release

 
 

CUSTOMER PROBLEM

Finding the right product to meet your needs can be a challenging process. With various factors like budget, features, image resolutions, viewing distances, and installation costs to consider, the last thing you want to worry about is space planning.

After speaking with our in-home advisors, we were surprised to learn that only a third of customers measured their space before their first store visit. This meant two-thirds of customers shopping for TVs and large appliances needed to return home to take measurements or schedule an appointment with an advisor.

 
 
 
 

TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC

As a new product, detailed data on Vision Pro users is still emerging. Given its premium price ($3499-$3899) and advanced technology, we anticipated that our target audience would be high-income males, particularly younger adults aged 18-34, with a strong interest in immersive technologies.

 
 

DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS

At the time, our only retail competitor, Lowe’s Style Studio, offered large, walkable scenes with fixed products that could be swapped out. We saw an opportunity to take immersion even further—bringing the store into your home. By leveraging the physics engine, we enabled realistic interactions like dropping or throwing products, making the experience more dynamic and engaging. Instead of simply viewing a staged space, users could design and experiment with their own, creating a truly personalized experience.

 
 

Lowe’s Style Studio

 
 

FEATURE PRIORITIZATION

Following a 1-week development spike, we gathered to strategize and prioritize key features for the minimum viable product and future iterations utilizing a 2x2 matrix.

 
 
 
 

CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

For the Envision logo, we added a shadow to enhance depth and emphasize the app’s 3D nature.

 
 

Best Buy Envision logo designed by Daniele Lanza

Iconography by Dave Kover (Standards) and color contrast by Rachel Grossman-Kahn (Accessibility)

CATEGORY MENU V1:
During our engineering sprint, we found that a honeycomb pattern was the most efficient layout for eye-tracking optimization, allowing buttons to enlarge when a user "gazed" at them. The design was influenced by the resolution constraints of the eye-tracking system. This version, reflecting four weeks of development, was released on February 8, 2024.

After selecting a category, users would navigate to a product list page displaying a curated selection of hard-coded 3D models.

Tapping the "View in room" button would trigger a transitional model. Once the user identified a sufficiently large horizontal surface, and tapped to place, the product seamlessly appeared in their space.

 
 

MVP RELEASE

Youtube channel “Trenton's Tech” test and review of the MVP

 
 

MEDIA COVERAGE

 
 

LESSONS LEARNED

  • After analyzing online reviews, we found that the most requested missing feature in this release was search functionality, which we implemented 2 weeks later.

  • Integrating Vision Pro with Best Buy’s servers for real time pricing was beyond our timeline. However, customers didn’t seem to mind since they could still access pricing through the website.

  • Apple was dissatisfied with our implementation of the immersive mode paradigm, as it conflicted with the hierarchical structures of other applications. Consequently, a formal request was issued to refactor our approach.

 
 

NEXT STEPS

  • Explore methods such as search, browsing, and discovery to improve product exploration and enhance the user experience.

  • Expand capabilities to include virtual assistant access, cart integration, and user profiles with account settings for greater personalization.

  • Redesign the app’s immersive mode to ensure it runs smoothly without interfering with other runtime applications.

 
 

CASE STUDIES

VIRTUAL TRY-ON

VIEW IN ROOM

MOBILE AR

SMART CAMPUS

RESPONSIVE WEB

BESPOKE SERVICES