ThirdChannel
Brand Ambassador Dashboard; iOS & Android | April 2018
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ThirdChannel is an intelligence platform for brick - and - mortar retail stores. The platform displays all the behavioral and operational data points in store, to help make critical business decisions.
I was brought onboard to help the product team build a dashboard solution to help their users have access to vital information they needed; To dos, earnings, scheduling, store visit progress. And to help the internal team at ThirdChannel work more efficiently w/their users; Store completion rates, incentives, scheduling, communication.
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USERS
The primary users of the iOS/Android app are Brand Ambassadors, who:
• Are hired through ThirdChannel, to help represent a brand in a positive light
and help increase brand awareness and sales.
• Provide a continuous feedback loop from in store, giving the retailer insight into product demand, merchandising successes, inventory levels, store traffic patterns and even weather impact.
TEAM & ROLE
My role involved leading the design for the mobile team. I coordinated with the lead product manager, lead designer, offshore engineering team and
ThirdChannels customer success team.
I worked on the:
APPROACH
When I first started working on the Brand Ambassador Dashboard, my main initiative was to understand and define the core needs of ThirdChannels users and customer success team. This involved exploratory conversations with ThirdChannels internal team - who had a lot of insight into what their users needed to succeed at their job.
CHALLENGES
The main challenges I had was:
• Introducing a new paradigm to ThirdChannel users. Users were accustomed
to manually documenting store visits via paper and pen.
• Both the iOS & Android app were utilizing out of the box components; with limited colors and interactions. I had to introduce new styles/interactions that wouldn't diverge from the current experience.
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BROUGHT TO LIFE
Here are some screens from the final designs.
My main goal was to:
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TYPOGRAPHY
COLOR THEME
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WHERE IT BEGAN
Below is a project plan showcasing a 5 week timeframe, to show the different phases of the project. This helped me, the product team and engineering visualize the entire project; to see the outputs, deliverables and any dependencies.
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BRAINSTORMING & PROJECT KICK OFF
Week 1 & 2 involved kicking off the project, to define the core needs of the customer success team and ThirdChannel users.
After introductory research, the main theme across the board was that the users lacked motivation to schedule visits and complete tasks. When the users don’t complete their store visits/tasks, ThirdChannel: doesn't meet the brands expectations, is not able to deliver valuable retail intelligence and has a lot of employee turnover.
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INSPIRATION
Before sketching my ideas, I like to use Pinterest to collect inspiration from competitors, popular applications, fun animations and anything that intrigues me (doesn’t have to be software related). To help expand my vision, I like to stay on top of the latest trends, what users are accustomed to and continue to learn from the best.
Here are a number of designs that helped me evolve the
Brand Ambassador dashboard:
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SKETCHING MAGIC
When it comes to tackling a design problem, for me it always starts with a blank page and a pencil before taking the digital plunge and perfecting pixels. I support the fail-fast approach and sketching helps me generate many ideas without the focus being on colors, typography, animations etc.
Here are some initial sketches for the Brand Ambassador Dashboard:
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INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Based on the user flows, I wanted to make sure that there was a minimal level of difficulty for users to access relevant information. After all, the goal of the Brand Ambassador Dashboard was to enable users to quickly take action/ consume information. I bucketed the information by to dos, earnings, and to gamify the experience with achievements/incentives.
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USER TESTING
The Brand Ambassador Dashboard was well received within the company and the users we tested with. I began by interviewing various users who were technically savvy to users who were unfamiliar with the app.
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The main objective was:
• Do users understand their daily objective using the dashboard?
• Do users feel excited/motivated to complete a visit?
The main theme across the board, was that:
Users understood their daily objectives, that ‘overdue’ or anything red needed
to be addressed. And that money/incentives was a key factor in motivating users to schedule visits.
“
The red = overdue. Oops. I'm overdue, I better do it!
“
The achievements and the potential earnings, are motivating
for me to schedule more visits.
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OUTCOME
While I didn't see the dashboard released, I was confident it would increase productivity and decrease communication w/the Customer Success team. With the mobile team, we had come to some important insights about what was important for their users to complete their tasks and what the user needed to know and when.
As a result of this experience I learned that redefining a paradigm is a huge investment and takes time. It’s important to leverage current paradigms and to keep evolving the experience. There’s a definite gain in setting the bar high, but I had to take a step back and be realistic about my goals/what could be developed for the short term. Achievements was taken off the plate - it involved more research and back end development/logic around star ratings, swag, contests etc. From the user testing, users were most excited/intrigued about this section! But there’s definitely a balance that needs to be met.
Thanks for scrolling till the end :)
Please appreciate this project if you like it. I'm also available for new projects. Say hello at jkolbech@gmail.com
