Redesigning the in-store associates’ handheld experience.
THEME
Intern Enterprise Product
DURATION
June 2019 - July 2019, 6 weeks
ROLE
UX Designer
TEAM
Product Manager
Matt Scholtka
Scott Ackmann
UX Design
Marcus Hamilton
Nimrod NegosaJr
Rishabh Bhardwaj
UX Research
Andreas Woelk
Grace Sun
AK Leung
SOE
Hannah D'Angelo
Alexandra DuJardin
Creative
Daniel Roberts (copy)
Shawn Bast (visual)
Kohl's in-store associates use Bluebird handheld devices to complete many tasks, such as managing the inventory, printing out the tags, pairing the items with E-Signs, etc. However, Microsoft support for Bluebird ends in 2019 and 22,000 devices will be affected. Besides migrating 27 applications from Bluebird to Android, Kohl's started this long-term project also trying to update and redesign the overall handheld experience for associates.
I joined this ongoing project during my internship and finished designing for four epics in two applications with the team together.
We HOPE TO increase the associate satisfaction and promote the adoption of process standards that optimize payroll, drive operational efficiency and enable a better customer experience
BY creating a consistent, efficient and intuitive experience with insights into productivity
FOR store associates.
We generally followed this process for each epic. All the cross-functional review sessions were done through online meetings. The schedule was also flexible based on the complexity of the certain epic.
Click here to view detailed design and process of a featured chapter - Wayfinding. Below I also present a UI outcome sample from the whole project, one of my wireframe deliverable samples and an overview of my involvement in each chapter.
I was one of the three UX designers of this project.
For the first Print Management chapter, I iterated on the initial design and made the deliverables since I was getting familiar with the project background, associates’ working flow and the design system of this project. From the second chapter, I started participating in all stages of the design, including whiteboarding for ideation, presenting in JAD sessions, following ideation for iterating, wireframing and prototyping. Especially for the last two epics, Adset Inquiry and Wayfinding, I designed the two Initial wireframes of each chapter, set the foundation for future improvements, presented them to the stakeholders and got approved.
All my designs for the four chapters is being developed and will be used by Kohl’s in-store associates all over the country in 2020.
My other individual project during Kohl's internship had me playing the whole game and designing from scratch. This one was a different one. It was an ongoing project mainly focusing on interaction design. Working on such a project made me dig deeper into interaction design details than I had ever done before. For the first time I went into the process of questioning every single component in an interface, through which I learned that even designing for a simple interface could be infinitely complex. After doing this project, I started to pay more attention to interaction details while I was using digital products and have noticed many deliberately designed interfaces.
From the experience of working in a cross-functional team for this project, I learned that it’s a big part of designers’ job to clearly present our working process and introduce design principles to other organizational stakeholders. Although as designers, we need to keep the technology, business and many other aspects in mind while designing, it doesn’t mean we should prioritize other values over user experience. In fact, we are the evangelist for user experience in the organization, we should try our best to raise stakeholder’s awareness of the value of design and good user experience. Convincing is not waste of time at all, on the contrary, it could help develop mutual understanding and better collaboration within the cross-functional team.
This was a tip from one of my mentors. He suggested that I think from other stakeholders’ perspective and anticipate what questions they would ask before actually presenting the design to them. This enabled me to look at my own work more critically and realize some issues that I hadn’t considered. In this way, I could iterate on the design even before presenting so that it could save some time of the JAD session for more critical and harder questions. The other case is that sometimes I might not want to change the design, in this situation I could better proposed this design by anticipating questions from stakeholders. Therefore, in either way, this tip contributes to a more efficient cross-functional meeting.
Heartfelt thanks to the cross-functional team we met almost everyday online for their effort on this part of the App Migration project and their valuable feedbacks on designs. Especially many thanks to UX folks who participated in this project for giving me the opportunities to take essential part of the work and practice, and helping me improve on both crafting and presenting designs.
