Rack Room Shoes
Innovation Lab
While working at Rack Room Shoes, I had the great privlage in helping create our very own innovation lab. Although the logo is purely conceptual, I thought it would be awesome to share my personal vision for the labs project.
What is the Innovation Lab?
The Innovation Lab is composed of designers and developers who work on new, exciting, and innovative projects for Rack Room Shoes. When any new componet or website feature is created it is passed through the lab to get researched, built, tested, and spun through production.
Design. Build. Test. Iterate.
We believe in only shipping projects once they are truly ready for the user to interact with. Componets or features should serve a purpose. If it serves no benefit to the user then it shouldn't exist. Good design isn't just about how it looks and feels. Good design is about how it works and how it makes the users experience easier.
The Purpose For the Lab
The purpose of the Innovation Lab is to triage all project request from different departments at Rack Room Shoes. By doing so we can look at the project request as a group and determine if the request is needed, the best way to handle the request, and iterate on ways we can improve the intial request. This process allows designers and developers to focus on tasks at hand vs. getting bogged down.
The Ultimate Goal
We want to give more time back to the designers and developers. We found that working on all projects that came through the production pipeline, was very tedious and, often times, unnecessary. We built this process in order to take back control of what was important to us (the user/customer).
I'd love to see this project grow (and it has). We've taken steps as a group to handle these project request from a users point of view. In order for us to continue to see growth, we will need to dive further into the other processes we currently have in place. We'll need to determine the flaws in those process and button up any loose ends so that way our Innovation Lab process can continue to grow and become more beneficial for all parties involved.
Next Steps for the Lab
We will continue to vet this process and make improvements where we see fit. As we continue to work as a team we will continue to create creative solutions for modern day problems for our users.
