Find Your Favorite Shoes

The PUMA Store Locator is a Grails web service in use on PUMA brand sites that automatically displays the store location to the user based on geo-location services and user selections.

Challenge: A Hodge-Podge of Locators

PUMA’s existing store locators had been developed piecemeal, generally only displaying locations state wide. The apps were inconsistent, slow to display results, and required significant user interaction to get the desired result. The apps were also difficult to maintain and upgrade given the number of versions in use. All of these issues tended to reduce usage.

PUMA’s goal was to develop a single store locator solution that could be deployed across multiple sites and platforms, including mobile. The improved app sought to deliver location results more quickly, with more flexibility, improved maintainability and be easier to modify and upgrade.

Approach: Power and Ease of Use

Cantina conducted a strategic assessment including stakeholder interviews, and user experience and technical reviews. The resulting analysis indicated the following feature enhancements were required:

• Automatic geolocation-driven search displays the most likely store location based on IP address analysis
• Free-text input further refines the result displayed
• An extensible API was developed driven by a custom micro-language (DSL) to enable site queries by store features, marketing campaigns and other flexible parameters
• API enables the store locator to run on multiple platforms including an iPhone app, the main PUMA site, micro sites, discussion boards, and other mobile platforms
• The store locator is internationalized and can be used to support any number of languages, measurement systems (ie imperial or metric) and calendaring variations (days of week, daylight savings, year)
• The management UI enables non-IT staff to manage store attributes such as features, campaigns, special events, celebrity appearances, and hours
• The store locator app was developed on Grails to utilize PUMA’s existing Java infrastructure, while enabling rapid application development
• The service supports both XML and JSON responses for flexibility and easy integration with existing systems

Results: The Most-Used Feature on all of the Sites

The Store Locator has been a huge success for PUMA, powers the most viewed page on all of PUMA.com, and is the most used web service. Geolocated results are automatically returned at sub-second speeds. The app has been incredibly stable with minimal maintenance and support required since it was deployed.