REDESIGNING THE WHOLESALE EXPERIENCE FROM WITHIN

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Project 1: Unified App

My contribution:

• Design Research

• Interaction Design

We audited a landscape of 70+ apps that employees use on a daily basis for their roles and created a unified app: a central hub improving accessibility and key functionality of internal tools.

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Project 2: Service Redesign

My contribution:

• Design Research

• Service Design

We were tasked with rethinking the way customers are able to request and receive assistance in a retail warehouse. We created a new customer assistance process including software, hardware, and service solutions.

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Project 3: Exit Experience

My contribution:

• Design Research

• Service & Interaction Design

With the goal of decreasing wait times and increasing the accuracy of cart audits by employees, our team provided solutions targeting the exit flow and an improved digital receipt.

Across all three projects, we used this design process to guide our work

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Creating partnership with the client from the beginning

At project kickoff, we aligned with our client on expectations and desired outcomes. We asked the following question: “In order for the research to be successful, what questions should we answer with the research?”

Together we generated over 250 LOI questions and took those questions back to our studio to synthesize them for patterns. We then evaluated each question based on how relevant it was to our project goals and began building a foundation for our research framework. We chose to digitize each question into a google sheet as way to easily collaborate across the team and further build our partnership with our client through sharing real-time progress and findings.

1. Day In The Life

Documenting the current mental model of employees as they complete a typical daily shift, including tools and pain points.

This activity was used as the foundation for the personas.

2. Feature Prioritization

We gave employees a set of features generated by the business and asked them to prioritize each based on the importance to their roles.

This activity surfaced key functionality for the unified app.

3. Ideal Home Screen

A blank canvas for employees to design an ideal future home screen for their new app.

This activity helped us understand how each persona would use the new app.

4. Ideal Associate Assistance

A card sorting activity that deconstructed the current customer service process, allowing employees to build their ideal future process.

This activity gave us direction as to what was viable for potential concepts and designs.

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Co-creating to find deeper insights

The amount of questions we wanted answers to quickly proved what a monster of a research project we had ahead of us. We wanted to get as much time with employees as we could while respecting the needs of the participating stores, so we worked together with managers and our stakeholders to find the best solution. We focused on actively involving our interview participants by utilizing co-creation activities to help spark unique connections and insights. From tech to customer assistance, we narrowed down our original 250 question set to a 90 minute framework, weaving interactive materials throughout.

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3 states, 30 participants

We sent two research teams into the field to conduct interviews. We observed employees in their day to day responsibilities and guided them through our research activities described in the research framework above.

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Google sheets, the new Post-it notes

With over 45 hours of interview content we had a mountain of information to synthesize. We had five designers simultaneously inputting data and generating insights so we chose to use a google sheet to seamlessly collaborate between the team. This allowed us to easily organize information and quickly search and find key quotes and insights.

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Our persona work was the first time personas had been created to represent our client’s in-store employees

Each persona was birthed out of our research and focused on five different roles, the main users of our projected work. We focused on their main characteristics, tasks, pain points, tools used, and overall opportunities of how our designs could impact their work. As a foundation for understanding their employees, our persona work will continue to be used in future projects done by our client’s internal teams.

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Using deconstruction to construct solutions

As a team we used deconstruction to break down every step in the existing process in order to rethink and evaluate each element. Identifying the unique elements of a process gave us the building blocks to form new ways of solving current pain points. This was especially significant as we ideated for the service design components of both the customer service redesign and exit experience projects.

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Detailing all the possibilities

We made detailed models of interaction states for each element. This was part of a larger Design Language System we created for our client to use across all internal apps and to unify the employee’s experience. In the example above we show the interaction states of cards used in the new employee dashboard we created as part of the unified app.

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As technology continues to change how we buy, how do you find the sweet spots between the current state of operation and the idealized future?

The scope of these three projects focused on internal redesigns for a big box retailer. These designs were created in an effort to meet the ever increasing demand for seamless retail experiences. In a warehouse environment with bulk buying, customers still expect the same level of customer service provided to them at more boutique retailers and the ease of buying they experience online. But with over 600 locations, a technological overhaul cannot happen overnight. These projects presented the challenge of creating solutions that set direction for the future, but could be implemented successfully and provide relief in the near term. This crossroads allowed me to sympathize with the needs of a major corporation seeking to find the balance of keeping their business moving forward while also rethinking current structures and resources. The projects brought me new perspectives and insights into this design tension assumedly felt by many major corporations as they move forward into the future of the physical retail experience transformed by digital innovation.