Retail DX
Empowering frontline store staff with data-informed insights.
Backgound
Flow is a B2B SaaS data analytics platform aimed at retailers in Japan. The platform connects to store data sources — the POS, cameras, traffic sensors, collecting and displaying data on a dashboard and via various reports.
I am the sole designer at the company working directly with the founder, lead engineer, customer success as well as offshore development members. It is a small team and I support design across the web and mobile app.
Lead UX Designer
Research Strategy Layout Usability PrototypingMarch 2024~Current
Challenge
The combination of Japan's declining population, an aging society, and the rise of e-commerce is forcing brick-and-mortar retail stores to continuously evolve their customer experience in order to attract and retain customers.
Moreover, the company's growth has stagnated, which is further compounded by the lack of a clear value proposition. Key design issues, such as confusing data visualizations, poor information architecture, and the absence of a user onboarding flow, also hinder the service's potential.
Goals
- Define a strategy based on the company vision, business goals, and user needs.
- Shift focus to empowering frontline store staff with data-informed insights.
- Increase transparency and knowledge sharing among stores.
- Improve design language, information architecture, the data visualizations for easy comprehension, and overall usability.
Purpose
Empowering frontline store staff with data-informed insights so that they can improve store performance.
UX Audit
Research, Synthesis, and Findings
Interviews with 25+ store managers from 6 different companies. Over those interviews, we got to understand their job role, their daily tasks, challenges, and how they use data.
Findings in a nutshell: low data literacy, high staff turnover, low customer service skills impacting sales, no knowledge transfer, and a lack of communication and information sharing among stores.
Solution
The solution combines data-informed insights with user's qualitative feedback to create a rich repository of the retailer. This enables tailored insights and suggestions that enhance performance and increase transparency among stores.
Layout & Hierarchy
- Information re-prioritized based on behavioural data and user feedback.
- Added visual hierarchy to communicate the priority of the information shown.
- Layouts and section headings to facilitate natural scanning and information finding.
- Introduce more types of data visualizations appropriate to the task.
Results
This project is ongoing.