Connected Store Experience

Leading Japan entertainment company connecting customers to stores.

Background

Goodpatch is a leading design agency in Japan. I had the opportunity to join them for this short contract project that they had with a Japanese entertainment (エンタメ) company who wanted a mobile app for their new stores. Goodpatch was tasked with providing the design direction and delivering specifications to the outsourced development company.

Working entirely with Japanese team members for the first time was a valuable challenge in terms of culture and language differences 🙌🏼.

Process

As the client had a defined scope, short timeline, and expected specific deliverables, we had to move quickly. We began by taking their requirements and creating rough wireframes for initial discussions. The process included:

• Understand the requirements: As the project timeline was short, I read through the documentation and noted down anything that I raised questions for our next meeting.
• Brainstorming assumptions and questions: Clarify expectations and align our understanding.
• Create personas: Further elaborated on by the client. This helped to guide design decisions.
• Formulate a strategy: Align Goodpatch and the client on the purpose of the app and its scope.
• Created wireframes in Figma: This helped us get quick feedback from the client before moving to high fidelity work.
• Create high fidelity prototype: Clickable prototype with detailed user interactions helped bring the project close to the finish line.

Planning

Alongside the other Goodpatch team members, we interpreted the requirements, defined the user, store, and business needs.

We started with wireframing at a very high level the key flows of the app. Having a tangible wireframe for those early conversations was really helpful in getting the client's to feel more comfortable in sharing their thoughts and getting the project moving forward.

Collaboration

We held daily meetings with the stakeholders to understand their primary and secondary target users, defined the underlying concept, worked within their brand guidelines, and presented various directions and handed off the specifications to the external dev teams to deliver the final product.

Development & Design

The final designs and specifications were handed over to the external development team to complete the iOS and Android app.

Reflection

Most of my experience is in startups and designing for B2B, so working with a design agency on a B2C project was a nice change of pace. Adapting to the agency way of working was an interesting challenge and helped me gain perspective on the different types of working styles and projects out there.

Agencies value the client relationship, speed, polish, and presentation, while startups are user-obsessed, hypothesis-driven, and iterative by nature.