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Improving the BOPUS Experience at Nordstrom Rack
Overview
Client: Nordstrom (Completed in partnership with Nordstrom through a graduate-level course at the University of Washington.)
Team: 4 Researchers
Duration: 6 weeks
My Role: Study Design, Participant Recruiting, Test Moderation, Analysis, Reporting
Goal: Identify pain points in the “Buy Online, Pick Up In Store” experience on the desktop site and recommend improvements to enhance customer satisfaction.
Impact: This study resulted in actionable recommendations that prompted Nordstrom to prioritize and begin resolving two identified usability issues.
“Buy Online & Pick Up in Store” (BOPUS) is a service that lets customers buy items online and pick up in store the same or next day.
This study focused on the Nordstrom Rack desktop site to uncover pain points in the customer journey to improve the BOPUS experience.
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Heuristic Evaluation
Our team began by each conducting a heuristic evaluation of the website’s BOPUS service, focusing on the journey from identifying items available for same-day pickup to adding them to the shopping cart. This evaluation followed Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics to identify key usability issues that we further explored through moderated usability testing.
Key findings from my heuristic evaluation:
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Visibility of System Status: Conflicting messages about item availability created confusion. For example, items displayed as available for pickup but were actually unavailable at the selected store.
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Error Prevention: Users are able to add unavailable items to their cart, which led to confusion during checkout.
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Consistency and Standards: The wording around pickup and shipping options was inconsistent, leading to further confusion.
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Help and Documentation: Users unfamiliar with the pickup-only process could not easily find help documentation.
These insights from the heuristic evaluation set the foundation for the research questions and usability testing that followed.
Research Questions
Following the heuristic evaluations, we developed the following research questions:
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How easily and successfully can users navigate the Nordstrom Rack desktop website to find and purchase same or next-day pickup items?
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Do users understand the difference between same-day pickup items and other fulfillment options (eg: shipping items)?

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How easily and successfully can users purchase same or next-day pickup items available at different store locations?

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What key pain points are preventing users from successfully completing their purchase without confusion?

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How clear and understandable is the information around item availability and pickup locations on the website?
Moderated Usability Test
Participant Breakdown: (N = 8)
After distributing a survey and screening responses, we selected 8 participants based on the following criteria:​
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Regular online shoppers who live near a participating Nordstrom Rack store.
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Shop for clothing, makeup, or home goods at least 3 times per year.
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Excluded participants who work in retail or UX research to avoid bias.​
Test Scenarios:
Three scenarios were developed to evaluate participants’ ability to navigate the "Buy Online & Pick Up in Store" feature:
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Find an item available for same-day in-store pickup, add it to the shopping bag, and proceed to checkout.
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Find an item available for same-day pickup at a different store, add it to the shopping bag, and check out.
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By the end of the second scenario, participants should have two different items from two different stores in the shopping bag.
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Find information on how long Nordstrom Rack will hold purchased in-store pickup items.
Data Collection:
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Pre-Test Interviews helped gather insights into participants' shopping habits and online behavior.
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Think-Aloud Method allowed me to observe participants’ decision-making and frustrations as they interacted with the website.
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Post-Test Questionnaires provided additional feedback about the participants’ experience, highlighting specific pain points and areas for improvement.
Analysis
We created a spreadsheet to document observations and outcomes for every participant, organized by task. We identified recurring patterns and summarized them as overall themes for each task, applying thematic analysis to highlight key usability insights and pain points.
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Findings & Recommendations
Finding 1: The "Available Today" filter does not work as expected, filtered results showed unavailable sizes/colors.
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Recommendation: Refine filtering logic to only show in-stock variations, grey out unavailable options and clarify availability by size/color.
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Filtered product showing up as “Available today”, but it is not actually available today.
Finding 2: Adding “Pickup Today” items into the shopping cart from multiple stores causes unexpected system behavior.
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Recommendation: Refine filtering logic to only show in-stock variations, grey out unavailable options and clarify availability by size/color.
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Users are not made unaware if the item from store A will not be available for pickup upon switching to store B.
Item from store A was marked as sold out with no explanation.
Finding 3: Pickup logistics around item hold time were difficult to find.
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Recommendation: Add pickup details around item hold duration directly on the product page, shopping bag, and checkout.
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Information on how long a BOPUS item will be held once purchased from FAQ page.
Impact:
This study identified usability issues that directly impacted customers’ ability to find and purchase items for same or next-day pickup. We presented our findings to the Nordstrom team, who gained a deeper understanding of user needs and pain points through clear, evidence-based insights. Our research closely aligned with Nordstrom's own observations and priorities, reinforcing the value of a user-centered approach.
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I reached out to Nordstrom 11 months later, and learned that our study led to the prioritization of two specific issues that Nordstrom is currently working on fixing.
Reflection
I learned a great deal through this process, and a few things I would do differently are:
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Improve Data Collection: To gain a deeper understanding of participant efficiency and pain points, I would measure time spent per task, clicks per task, and error rates. I now understand the importance of this data as these metrics would help provide a clearer picture of task efficiency and usability.​
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Trust the 5-Participant Rule: Even though our team had the time and resources to conduct tests with eight participants, if I could go back, I would have tested with five participants. We decided to test with eight mainly to account for no shows, but as Jakob Nielsen suggests, as you add more users, you will keep seeing the same things again and again. While all of the feedback we gathered was valuable, seeing the same issues repeated early on reinforced my confidence that testing with five participants would have been sufficient.