As seen on the Best Buy Apps Blog:

An experimental team building an experimental app.That's the one sentence description for how the Best Buy Iphone app (and Android app) came into being.

Large corporations like Best Buy are typically not known for their ability to experiment; or their tolerance for failure. They're especially not known for their expertise in software design and development. In this sense our iPhone app project was really something of an anomaly. The project got started more than 18 months ago as an experiment with the realization that being involved in the mobile app world would be an important connection point between Best Buy and its customers. Indeed, the development team responsible for it's creation was started as yet another experiment. Two experiments wrapped in an anomaly.

Build instead of buy

Best Buy, for better or worse, often chooses to buy solutions to it’s software challenges rather than to build them. Building software inside such a large organization with need to access key data systems can be a tough mountain to climb.  This dynamic in particular added a large element of risk for us to put this team together. Our counterpoint to that risk was to organize in a way that leveraged trust and expertise and maximized the responsibility of each member.  This model has led to some successes and certainly some failures but ultimately has led us to a higher level of quality (we feel) in the applications we’ve produced.

The decision to build internally is paying off for two key reasons based on the notion of proximity.

First is the proximity to users and their feedback. Being embedded keeps us close to the unfiltered comments of our users. Our users have consistently provided very honest, accurate, and sometimes uncomplimentary feedback, (especially at first). We read the comments our users post to the AppStore and Android Market and we get email feedback from within the apps. Painful as it might be to get panned on something we put our heart and soul into; ultimately the raw honesty of our users has been priceless. User comments and suggestions help to drive our roadmap and influence our priorities.  Some requests are easier than others.

For example, currently, blu-ray titles are found scattered within all DVD titles. It has been a thorn in our side that we haven’t been able to create a separate category allowing users to browse just blu-ray movies. While this task may seem obvious and easy to accomplish to the user, (especially since one can browse blu-ray movies separately on bestbuy.com and its mobile version, m.bestbuy.com) providing ‘blu-ray only’ browsing in native apps is difficult based on where the data lives and how it can be accessed. But, we’re working on it.

The second type of proximity is to internal resources and teams. Being embedded in the organization allows for a shorter, more efficient path for the two way flow of information. On our side, we can more quickly access internal resources to make changes. Likewise, for our business team partners, they have an on-site resource for features they may want to add.

Reviews have improved steadily and our group is clicking.  Hopefully, you find these new features to be evidence of a group that has grown together.

We are continuing to experiment and try new features while attempting to match the feature sets of both platforms.  We’ll get there.

It’s been five weeks since our last update to the Best Buy iPhone app and four weeks since we published the last update to the Best Buy Android app.  This week, our group (Best Buy Emerging Channels) has released updates to both platforms.  (Android published today and the new version for iPhone is in review.)  We are really looking forward to hearing from our users.

The changes:

• Scanner - we updated our Mobile Code scanner to return results when users scan UPCs of Best Buy products.  (Barcodes on fact tags in-stores are not UPCs however, in-store fact tags will be changed to include a Mobile Code beginning August 23rd.
• Expanded product detail pages - more detailed product specifications are available on most products.
• Compare -users can compare one item to another side by side by scanning the Mobile Code or UPC of items in store or by landing on a product of interest and selecting an attribute (or more than one) to discover other products with similar characteristics. We’re planning a special piece on this feature as we’re especially proud of it’s design and utility.
• Splash screen image change - by popular request
• Lots of bug fixes

Special thanks to @mthollymayor for his innovative and intuitive design and to the pros @recursiveawesum.