Officeworks Home Screen

Officeworks Home Screen

Project Overview

Officeworks wanted to create a home screen and introduce a personalised experience. The app hasn’t been updated in a while and it was behind compared to other popular retail apps in the market.

Based on analytics, our app users know what they want and are in there to make that purchase. We don’t have users who browse around leisurely.

This post highlights the discovery, define and design process.

Challenges - a large group of stakeholders to liase with

Research

Here are the things that I did for this project:

• Competitor analysis - I explored popular apps within retail and travel. Most of these give you a personalised and/or seasonal content. These were also shared with the stakeholders to help get buy in.

• Pull out insights from past research and collate relevant analytics insights - I managed to conduct some baseline usability testing before the project started, so we had somewhere to start with. There were no prior research or studies. It was done with 5 users, I used Askable to find Officeworks App users. It had a landing screen with a list of categories where users have to drill down into the next 5-6 levels of subcategories and find their desired product. It is very difficult to browse, there is no quick starting point. This is not the standard practice for a retail app. Most apps have curated sections, where. users can jump in and begin to browse.

• Store visit - Armed with some giftcards as incentives, I went to an Officeworks store to get customers feedback on what they think of our landing screen. It was great to speak to different customers in store.

Users stayed for about 20 seconds on the landing screen, and 23% out of the 3000 visits went straight to search for an item. There was not a lot of browsing experience. Users had to find the right category, as you can see on the left is the previous landing screen experience.

There were interesting comments from our users and our analytics results were supported by these. Most of them go to the app with a purpose to buy what they need.

• Organise and run an ideation workshop with all the relevant stakeholders - I reached out to relevant stakeholders, organised lightning talks for the session and made sure our speakers were prepared, organised and facilitated a workshop for homescreen ideation. Everyone was keen to contribute to the app development, overall there were about 22 participants.

At the start of the workshop, I laid out some ground rules to start with. Therefore anyone who came in would understand what this workshop is about. I also set up a parking lot board, in case there were things to discuss further later down the track. I facilitated this workshop so I did not participate in the activities.

Ideation

In the ideation session we had a little warm up session with some squiggly bird and followed by good old Crazy 8 exercise.

After the crazy 8, I asked the participants to pair up and work on one design that they think would work or that they really like. Once that was done, we discussed those as a group.

The workshop went on for 2.5 hours. After the workshop, I collected all the amazing ideas from the room and worked on the vision piece.

Most of the ideas that came out were great, home screen with a lot of personalised content to help users get started. It was great to see how our stakeholders are aligned.