Reece Point of Sale Discovery
Background
Reece is known in Australia for bathroom and plumbing. They have 600+ stores in Australia and New Zealand. They cover other industries such as, heating, cooling, refrigeration and more.
I came in to be a part of the new POS project for the stores. They have a very old POS made out of 3 apps. One to process transaction on the spot, the other, as a quoting tool and another to place order for items that the store don’t have in stock.
At the start of the project, the team have had a look at off the shelf solutions and none of them could support their needs.
This project is called the Next Gen POS
This is the main POS for over the counter purchases.
Research
It took about 3 months to gather and validate the known issues with the existing POS. Here are some of the research activities that I was responsible for.
1. Branch Observations 🤓
I visited 14 branches across various Business Units to observe staff interaction with TRS (existing POS) while serving customers. This was done in between Covid related lockdowns.
How:
1-2 observers were present at a branch. Observers stayed out of the way, take notes, ask follow up questions and take photos or videos when necessary
2. Remote User Interviews 💻
Based on the observation in stores, there were common pain points and we wanted to validate these by speaking to more users. I planned to speak to our users in person but due to Covid lockdowns I had to conduct remote interviews.
How:
1 interviewer and 1 notetaker speaks to one or two branch staff. Sessions are recorded and I made sure to cover all business units.
3. Survey Piggy Back 🐷
I ran a satisfaction survey for previous project and added a question about existing POS.
Some of the feedback that came back, validated what we have discovered. Some others, led to a whole lot of other branches to speak to.
We have 41 different feedback.
Some are very valuable, some feedback fit in the pattern that we’ve discovered and some needed following up.
More remote interviews were booked to clarify some feedback.
4. TRS Hack Competition 🤩
During observation, we discovered that there were little hacks that branch staff do. From cheatsheets to sketches to help newer folks.
Unfortunately, sometimes they don’t even notice that it’s a hack because they are so used to it. Running a competition allows us to open it up to the broader group and gather as many hacks as possible in a fun way!
Competition was shared with Regional Leaders, posted in Workplace and included in the weekly newsletter.
We also have our Customer Experience Manger to re-share the post in workplace to get more traction.
We have 214 responses. 37 are feedback about the existing system.
The competition revealed many different hacks that different business units use
Competition post
Hack submission based on business units
All in, I’ve reached out and spoken to 56 branches across Australia and New Zealand
Key Findings
Current POS is not flexible enough to respond to changes required to meet both branch users’ and customers’ requirements
The learning curve is high, according to our users, product search is the most difficult to learn. Took users between 6-12 months to fully grasp it.
Current system is not made to cater for all business units.
Branch users are keyboard users. Keyboard shortcuts are very important.
Other Nuggets
Customers in different state use different terminology to refer to the same products, and in New Zealand, they use product codes
Some business units are not made for walk in sales
Some business units have no delivery fleet of their own and have used Uber to deliver parts.
After the extensive discovery work, I mapped out the user journey for our retail stores, minus these business units: On Site, Viadux and National Contracts. All three do not operate within the retail space.
Journey map for in-store interactions
Design
Based on all that research, I worked on a vision design to explore the ideal world. The idea is to have a vision that encompasses everything we wanted and scale it back from there. Below is a snapshot of having customer facing screen with a scanner so they can identify themselves and on the right is the POS screen.
I combined the three apps to live as one app with the flexibility to switch from processing transaction to adjusting pricing and creating purchase orders. Making sure that the app is flexible so that our branch staff will have more capacity in helping our customers and focus on building that relationship.
I’d work on prototypes and took them to a branch to get feedback, and also worked on unmoderated test using Maze and send out links to some branches. I’d collect and analyse the feedback on Trello and make changes to the design accordingly.
I looked for 3 group of users; under 12 months, 2–5 years and 10+ years experience with Reece. Newbies to cover learnability, 2–5 years to cover comfortable existing users and 10+ years to cover the super senior users who are not always open to change.
This is the whole process that I go through. Its a cycle of gathering feedback and iterate based on it.
I also work closely with our BA, front end developers during card kickoffs and walkthroughs to make sure we’re on the same page.
Update: We are now on release 2! We have the bare basic necessities covered.