Best Buy Idea X Blog

We're listening to your ideas and comments, and we're taking action. Read our blog to learn more about what we're doing and thinking.

Bumps in the road

Posted August 20th, 2010 by joshua

Just thought everyone deserved a little heads up.

We’re experiencing a few bumps in the road with our code at the moment.   Most of you won’t see anything at all as you use the site.  For those that do, just know that we have the mechanics looking under the hood and all should be back to normal next week.

We’re also working on some other things for what I’ll call IdeaX – phase 2.   Once we’ve nailed down the details for what that actually means, we’ll get back with you.

In the mean time thanks for your patience, thanks for your participation.

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Year In Review

Posted June 1st, 2010 by joshua

It’s been roughly a year since Best Buy IdeaX was born.  It felt like a good time to reflect on what’s happened in a years time; what was good, what was missed, and give you a taste of what’s to come.

One thing that’s been a source of pride for us is that we built the site.  The original team of Gary Koelling, Cam Gross, and Steve Bendt looked at a number of off the shelf crowd-sourcing platforms and true to their DIY/maker nature decided it would be a worthwhile venture to build the thing themselves.  The lads chose a local development shop, Bust Out Solutions, as a partner in creating IdeaX.  Jeff Lin and his team of designers and developers have been, and continue to be, a fantastic partner with IdeaX.

Owning the site allows flexibility, agility and affordable dev costs that we simply wouldn’t have with an off the shelf solution.  It was certainly more work, but the learning that has come along with it has been well worth the effort.

We feel like to this point we’ve built a great platform.  We feel like we’ve also got a great community building around the platform. However, we are well aware that a great platform with a great community isn’t enough.  To make this work the way we’ve envisioned; is to make sure that the insights our customers and employees have every day are getting expressed in the way we direct our business.   This requires the internal machinery that connects the ideas from the community to our business leaders.  More efficient social engineering within the company if you like.

This forms the core of our next phase of development for the ideax platform and program.   We’ve begun developing some changes under the covers that I’ll be blogging about in the coming weeks.  We’ve also started work on one of our most popular and exciting ideas that should bring significantly more attention to the site.  More to come very soon on this.

For now here are some milestones and numbers from year one of IdeaX.

May 6, 2009: Gary announces IdeaX on the IdeaX Blog

May 8: Best Buy IdeaX is born.

May 9: First Idea: Best Buy Buying Guides

May 16: 100th idea: IdeaX Number members viewed

July 28: 1000th idea: Digital Shelf Talkers

Dec 11: IdeaX moves to Heroku; a Ruby on Rails deployment platform

Feb 22, 2010: IdeaX code released as an open source project; BBYIDX

Traffic

Here’s the raw numbers on the first twelve months.

Active users is ~2000

Ideas submitted is over 7000.

Visits to the site to date (May 1, 2009 to today) is 158,775

Visitors = 127,855

Pageviews = 395,800

Where we need to get better – Closing the loop.

You’ll notice that I haven’t reported on which ideas have been implemented so far.  It’s not because we haven’t implemented any, we have (see this blog post for specifics on just a few of the ideas that have been implemented).  The reality is that some of them have been implemented, some of them are being tested, and some are being reviewed.   What’s been a significant challenge for us has been tracking everything down and accurately reporting back to the community of people who have taken the time to share with us.  This is the number one failing we are going to fix in phase two. The fix will come from a few feature changes on the site, but mainly it will come from getting the decision-makers here closer to the community.

Last but not least…

Thank you.  Thank you to the community of IdeaX members that submit, vote on and debate ideas that make our business better.   The community is the heart of IdeaX and we truly appreciate all the efforts you guys put into sharing your thoughts with us.

http://www.bestbuyideax.com/admin/ideas/997/edit
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Your Ideas In Action—Update on 5 Top Ideas

Posted March 18th, 2010 by John Sheehan

Hey all,

I wanted to give you a brief update or overview of what has been happening with your ideas, and share with you how important it is to hear your voices out here. It’s been about 10 months since we officially opened the doors to IdeaX and here is what has happened in those ten months. Five of the top six ideas on IdeaX are either in some form of consideration, testing or implementation.

Insignia Android Tablet – designed by employees and customers

This has been one of our fastest rising ideas to date and it is currently under consideration, by members of our Insignia Private Label Team and other leaders within Best Buy. Currently customers and Best Buy employees can share their ideas on what would make the ideal Insigna Android Tablet in our Currents Section of IdeaX.

Create Electronic Receipts

This is one of our longest standing ideas, and right now there are tests being done in the Phoenix market using Intuit QuickReceipts to put this idea to work, and help determine how it could roll out to all Best Buy locations nationwide. View this post from a member of our Reward Zone team for the latest e-receipt update.

Get rid of those stupid plastic boxes that are way too hard to open

While we haven’t made a lot of changes with our vendors products, our Private Label group that oversees our Insignia, Dynex and Rocketfish product lines have taken this idea and continue to develop customer and environmentally conscious packaging options that are easier to open.  More updates to come on this one.

Reward Zone Points Redemption

We heard that you wanted easier ways to redeem your Reward Zone points. Our Reward Zone leaders are currently working on tests that include new functionality within an iPhone app and an in store kiosk. More details to come on this.

Free Wifi in the stores

I just recently wrote a blog update on this about a 10-store test in our NY market offering free Wi-Fi to customers. We’d love to hear more about what information you’d like to access when you are in our stores, and begin to build experiences around that through free Wi-Fi access, smart phones and smart phone apps. You can share your ideas here.

These are just five of the top six ideas on the site. There have been numerous ideas with fewer votes, that teams at Best Buy are using to guide their current and future thinking. We will do our best to connect and comment on these as progress is made. In addition many of you have commented on how to improve this site and we continue to add new functionality, including idea submissions on Twitter, a new Twitter IdeaX page (come follow us) and a Currents feature on IdeaX that helps to bucket similar ideas and lets us ask you questions about what’s on your mind.

Thanks to everyone who has submitted an Idea, Comment or vote this year. Keep them coming. Your voices do make a difference.

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Free Wi-Fi Being Tested In NY Market

Posted February 8th, 2010 by John Sheehan

Hey all,

There’s some great news around one of the most popular ideas on IdeaX. Best Buy has been testing Free Customer Wi-Fi in 10 stores in the New York market. This is an exiting first step in turning our stores on for our customers to access content like our m.bestbuy.com site (including product reviews), your Reward Zone information (including points and purchases) and even connect to feedback sites like IdeaX and Twelpforce while you shop.

As a technology company, we know it doesn’t make sense for our customers to have to leave to connect to the Internet—and in many stores customer 3G access on their smart phones can be spotty at best.

Through this test Best Buy is looking to understand better how customers like you are connecting in our stores, so we can turn on new experiences while you shop. Right now the team working on this roll out is looking to learn from the NY test while working to get the budget to offer free Wi-Fi in more stores across the nation.

We’d love to continue to hear your thoughts and suggestions, on how you’d like to use Wi-Fi in our stores, and what experiences you’d like to have with our stores on your web-enabled phones.

You can share your thoughts and ideas on this topic in our Wi-Fi Current here.

This is your chance to shape the future experiences you have at Best Buy.

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Keep it Clean & Show Respect…Please

Posted December 17th, 2009 by John Sheehan

Hey all,

We’ve noticed recently that there have been a few occasions of rude and/or offensive comments between users on the site within various idea discussions. I’m offering this reminder to keep it clean and show respect to others. Disagreement and debate on ideas is great, as it can make ideas better and fuel new ideas. Although when disagreements become personal that falls outside the intended purpose of this site. If you feel like lobbing a personal insult, please refer back to our terms of use. They are not acceptable. If you choose to ignore those rules we will contact you directly and warn you that your access priviledges will be suspended if it is not cleaned up (regardless of your contribution level). So please, keep the great ideas, comments and even the healthy debate coming—just keep it clean.

P.S. Thanks to the 99.9% of you out here on IdeaX who show respect out here all the time. It’s appreciated.

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Our move to Heroku

Posted December 11th, 2009 by joshua

The IdeaX site is the culmination of work done by some carefully selected and dedicated partners.  Jeff Lin and the company he founded, Bust Out Solutions, are THE key partner for us as they have handled the development and design work on IdeaX since its inception.

Heroku logoA few weeks ago Jeff suggested we bring another partner into the fold, Heroku, a Ruby on Rails application deployment platform.   We’ve since taken Jeff’s suggestion and moved IdeaX to Heroku.  Jeff’s reason for recommending them…

“We were very interested in running IdeaX on a cloud computing infrastructure such as Amazon EC2, but the cost of maintaining our own EC2 instances was just too high, not to mention frustrating. Heroku solves those problems for us with their solid platform infrastructure and nice user interface. We’re saving time and money, and enjoying development much more.”

Today the Heroku guys put up a success story on their site about what we’re doing here with IdeaX, we thought we’d share some link love and a virtual clinking of the glasses with our new friends.

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Currents – New Feature on Ideax

Posted December 8th, 2009 by joshua

What’s this?  A new blog post?  Yes, we are still here, still paying a lot of attention, and actively thinking about the next iteration of the IdeaX platform.  Admittedly, we’ve been a bit absent from the blog, as an IdeaX member commented recently.  Thanks for the slap upside the head.

A couple of weeks ago the IdeaX team launched a new feature called ‘Currents’.

currentsbutton

If you’ve been on the site you’ve probably seen the currents button.  It may seem a small addition to the site, but its rather significant for the long term success of the platform.  In one sense, currents are the other side of the coin from ideas.  Whereas ideas come into the IdeaX community from multiple directions based on your creativity, random thoughts, real experiences in the stores, or some combination; currents help focus and organize the idea generation of the IdeaX community.  Our hope is that it lends to an overall cleaner organization of ideas.

The basic intent behind currents is to collect ideas related to a high level concept under a single ‘current’.  Right now, only admins of the page can set up a current.  This is intended for use by Best Buy employees so that our real world business problems can be published to the site and benefit from the creativity and passion of the IdeaX community.  This in turn focuses the thinking of the IdeaX community in a targeted direction.

Currents also take life as trends in IdeaX submissions start to surface.  As these trends in the idea ecosystem become apparent the currents feature allows admins to relate these ideas to each other.  We feel that this really helps the process of giving an idea life in the business, as often times pieces of related ideas, when put together,  lead to innovation.

You’ll know your idea has been added to a Current with an added line right above ‘Idea Status’ that says “Part of…” followed by the associated ‘Current’  if there is one.

currents post

Currents don’t take ideas out of their existing places, it simply adds them to the relevant current of ideas.  Over the coming days you may notice that some ideas of yours are added to currents of related ideas.  As of right now, an idea can be associated with only one current at a time.

As always, let us know what you think.

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RE: Create Electronic Receipts

Posted September 30th, 2009 by John Sheehan

Hey all,

We wanted to let you know that the 2nd most popular Idea post “Create Electronic Receipts” has been fully considered and reviewed. Here’s the feedback we’ve heard from the business team on the project:

“Thanks for all of the great ideas and comments on electronic receipts! We wanted you to know Best Buy is excited about this idea and we are actively looking into ways to deliver electronic receipts for customers.”

As a result, we have updated the status of the idea to REVIEWED. As you can imagine, there are processes and systems that need to be in place to accomplish something like this. So we will continue to update you as progress continues to be made on this idea. Thanks for putting your voices behind this and other ideas on the site.

And please, keep the great ideas coming in!

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Mobile Solutions

Posted August 25th, 2009 by Amy

We’ve been talking to a lot of people about mobile phones and mobile phone solutions that Best Buy could build to make shopping our stores easier. Some of you have posted ideas about different kinds of iPhone apps or specific features you’d like to see in iPhone apps, which is great! We’re evaluating all of those and trying to integrate as much as possible.

We’re interested in more. So we’re asking; do you live in a market or location that’s unique? Is there something about how you shop, the way you’d like to shop, or when you shop that could be enhanced by a mobile solution (i.e. SMS notifications, mobile apps, enhanced mobile website)? Are there notifications you’d like to receive on your phone from Best Buy? Is there specific information about our stores or our products you’d like at your fingertips? For employees, are there challenges your customers face that a mobile solution can ease?

We’d really like to hear from you. Yup, whether you are an employee or a customer, we’re all ears. We are looking to do some experimentation and think that you probably have a better sense of what’s going on in you area than we do. Please post an idea and vote, vote often! And when you post your idea, make sure to tag it mobile solutions so we can find it.

Thanks!
Amy Halford

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Top 3 Ideas Under Review

Posted August 24th, 2009 by John Sheehan

Hey all,

I wanted to give you an update on the status of a few hot Ideas. Currently the top 3 Ideas on the site are under review. This means various business teams at Best Buy are considering the ideas in some shape or form. The top voted ideas include:

Get rid of those stupid plastic boxes — Posted by Paul
There is new work already underway with Best Buy’s own Private Label brand team around new package development for some of their products. This is a small start, but exciting that our own house brands are leading this charge.

Create Electronic Receipts — Posted by fredneil2
There are a lot of conversations happening about the how and when. It’s a fantastic green opportunity and could be a great convenience for customers. There is no definitive answer, but it is certainly under review.

Reward Zone Points Redemption — Posted by s_foy
You can view the posted comments from our Reward Zone team under the actual Idea post. The Reward Zone team is always looking for new ways to improve the program and points redemption is a hot topic on the IdeaX site. A few ideas will be tested out over the next several months to see how members like them. More to come on this.

Your voices are being heard. In some cases your ideas are helping businesses make informed decisions about the future. In other cases, your ideas are reaffirming things we may already be considering. We will continue to update you on the status of these ideas and others. And thanks again for all of the fantastic ideas, comments and of course your votes. Keep them coming.

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