A Service Design Case: A new concept and experience store

ABOUT PROJECT

Project name: New store

Project during: 2 months

My role: Service Designer

Client: Marketing Trade and Product areas

Background: The most tourism company in Latin America that has acquired 13 tourism companies in Brazil and Argentina focused on B2C and B2B.

Goals: The Trade area has come to us wanting the “best experience in store”

Challenges: I) Our UX area didn’t have money, neither team, so I worked on this project alone; II) Another challenge was the Trade area has contract a consultory to design a new concept for store (and clientes) even before we could analyze, that means, we began after all the “experience” was projected and implemented; III) Few official data about the flows in the store; IV) The Trade area would want to scale this model for all the franchises even if not testing before.

ABOUT PROCESS

Discovery and collet stage

1. Kickoff: The stakeholders mentioned many times that the new store would offer a new experience and will get the brand out of our current and outdated model, but wasn’t clear where they wanted to arrive with this. I insisted with this information because if we don’t know which main goal, anything, anyway, and any deliverable is satisfactory.

I like to mentionat this story snippet of Alice in Wonderland:

“[Cat] Where are you going?

[Alice] Which way should I go?

[Cat] That depends on where are going

[Alice] I don’t know

[Cat] Then it doesn’t matter which way you go”

Alice and the cat were talking about what way she should go

2. Previous data: I asked consultory studies to understand where I’ve deeped, and which would be my research plan, my starting point.

3. Planning: After understanding the studies I’ve thought in a research plan and main goals: since there was a study focused on personas and experience projection, I didn’t lose anything because the real sellers and customers’ experiences hadn’t been analyzed yet and I wanted to guarantee the plan would embrace more aspects than they’ve imagined.

Here, it is so important to reinforce that we, Ux area, don’t project experience, but we influence with elements of user experience. Experience is an individual process.

4. Interviews: The new concept just shouldn’t impress our customers, but the new store should work for our sellers and manager, that means, who really use the environment all day, because their experiences reflect on customer experiences as well.

So I interviewed almost all of the sellers, discovering interesting things that weren’t contemplated in stakeholders’ minds (even mine)

5. Ethnographic field studies: I was in the new store for some days, and at the same time interval to observe the flows, processes and no-spoken things. I took notes about behaviors.

Hidden client: I asked some colleagues to go to the new store and simulate three kinds of customers based on personas by the consultory. My intention at the moment was to verify if what was projected really would happen.

Selection

6. Categorization: I discovered so many important information about the new store, so I spend some time to clustering all the data, pain points, actores, touch points, flows, competitors references and opportunities

7. Cross the information and make tangible: This moment demanded much abstraction, so my purpose was to make a seller journey, appointing problems in store structure and a quick wins resume. In this stage I discovered, resumely, why the projected experience by the consultory couldn’t work.

8. Checkpoint with stakeholders: It is not about just doing our research, but we research for others, and we should be concerned about their anxiety and deadlines. So in the middle I have presented my studies for them with a language near to their world and project status.

Creation

9. Suggestions and mapping company current actions: I have beginn conversations with some fields in the company to understand what was executing and could contribute with the problems found.

Example of material has showed

10. Directions for involved areas: This part was basically instructing the specific areas, for example, the back office area, team, to understand the problem context and respective suggestions, going ahead with deep research.

Results

The acceptance was hard, but the stakeholders have complied with my suggestions, not all of them, but it was very satisfactory to see that study has influenced the other areas.

Technologies

Miro and Figma

References

CARROLL, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland