Designing a New Device Experience for Store Associates

Goal

Reimagine the associate experience with more than two dozen native apps for process and inventory management and offer contextual training to increase operational efficiencies and improve associate and customer satisfaction.

Role

Project initiator and lead

Timeline

The project has been ongoing for 24 months since its inception.

Approach

To lay the foundation for this initiative, my team conducted extensive research to build a baseline understanding of the current operational processes and the associate experience with the app ecosystem, identifying inefficiencies and friction points. We then interviewed 30 stakeholders and created a stakeholder relationship map to clarify roles, responsibilities, and interdependencies.

Our prep work led to a 3-day workshop with all key partners, where we aligned on a shared value hypothesis (goal), a set of guiding principles (approach), the overall design direction, and a collaborative product development process that allowed us to be agile without compromising a data-driven, user-centered approach.

To ensure consistency across all apps, we created a new design system and interaction model that leveraged Material Design principles and components. In addition, we developed a comprehensive KPI portfolio to measure the initiative’s success along multiple dimensions at the system and individual app levels.

Our project was presented to the senior leadership team and has since been utilized as an internal case study, demonstrating our ability to build interdisciplinary rapport and establish a unified vision, strategy, and working model.

Deliverables

Our deliverables included a baseline assessment of the current experience, an evaluation of associate needs and expectations, an analysis of business goals and expectations, a stakeholder relationship map, a value hypothesis, guiding principles, process maps for store operations, high-level design concepts, a new design system, an agile product development process with ongoing user testing, flowcharts for the new experience, prototypes for user testing, and a comprehensive KPI portfolio.