TR-OTM

Some of the project concepts and processes are under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). I have used dummy data on all of the screens to protect the confidentiality of the content. All the work belongs to the respective companies and should not be copied or recreated in any manner.

Travel Retail is ELC's one of highest growth channel, which covers the world of duty-free environments including airports, airlines, cruises and downtown locations. As the global leader in prestige makeup and skincare in Travel Retail, ELC wants to expand into new airports, increasing the number of brands, products and services they offer to travellers and converting more travellers into buyers.

Travel Retail - On the Move (TR-OTM) is a multi-platform retail management system which helps manage and assess travel retail brick & mortar stores and monitor their sales activities across the world.

6 -7 Months

Sketch, Invision, Zeplin

Native IOS/Android and Web application

The challenge

Estée Lauder Companies ensures the white glove experience they offer for their products and services is always consistent across all the stores. The store set-up, the product placement and the customer engagement conventions are tuned and monitored from time to time to ensure the best customer experience. The challenge was to build a platform which helps sales managers assess the store from this perspective, document all the reports and also help out the store in repair and maintenance. They needed a digital transformation of their manual process for better business sustainability.

My role

The project was initially led by my Creative Director Aniket Patni, and I was brought in on the project as a UX designer. When I joined the project the MVP with few major functionalities were already concretised. I worked closely with the ELC's Travel Retail Director - Jayesh Mehta and Sr. Business Analyst/Project Manager - Meghna Deshpande, to further shape the requirements and define the experience of the functionalities.

My role was to understand and analyse the use cases and requirements from the client, create concepts, demonstrate them and drive the feedback sessions.

The project was worked on in a very fast and iterative process. After the project kickoff meeting, we delivered the first release in merely 5 months. The approach was to always go to the client with a design conceptualised according to our understanding which would then aid further discussion and define the functionality. The idea was to fail as early as possible in the understand stage so that the solution can be iterated quickly to match users expectation. We worked in an agile manner to deliver the enhancements and additional functionalities every few weeks with the new release of the app.

Process

As this was a fixed prices engagement the timelines were really stringent. I had to keep my discovery lean so that I have more time in belting out the screens for the development team and helping them get started as fast as I can. My understanding of the solution came from my Design Director and initial kick-off/ requirement gathering calls. The IT Director and the Project Manager were also the SMEs and had a great understanding of the users who were going to use the platform.

Challenges

The major challenges faced by the user were -

Creating reports on ppt, maintaining excel sheets for marketing events and sharing VM documents over mail was a manual laborious process which needs a lot of time investment and resources. Locating a required document or a required set of data is always a painstaking task when data management is manual.

01 Managing multiple disjointed systems to carry out daily task

The users were using multiple systems to manage marketing, sales, visual merchandising and education activities. Documenting and accessing data from multiple sources demanded a lot of time and effort from the user.

02 Manual time-consuming way of work

03 No standardised process for managing and monitoring TR activities.

There were no standard practices set for assessing and monitoring the store activities and guideline adherence. These process would differ from store to store which lead to inconsistencies in the customer experience as well.

Users

Two major personas who would be using the application extensively were identified. Apart from these personas, there were a few users acting as super admins who can grant access permissions and upload content to the application.

These are the hands-on users who are responsible for the Travel Retail stores in their area.

Area Sales Manager
Account Coordinator

Regional Brand Director

These are the business owners and overlooked the sales of a particular country or geo.

Senior General Manager

Analyse

Next step was to understand the existing ways of working

User journeys

By creating a user journey I was able to understand how does a day in the life of the user looks like and get a feel of the context and the environment in which the application is going to be used. This also helped me to validate my understanding gathered from the stakeholders and ensured that we all are on the same page before the next step of designing the application was started.

We identified the experience's ups and down after mapping the end-to-end journey and pinpointed the areas of improvement.

Existing systems in use

The application used were legacy software and were not customised as per the user's needs. These systems were a plethora of data with a lack of usability and intuitiveness. Here are some of the screenshots of the application. The screenshots are blurred out to keep the sales data safe.

This exercise helped me to see the world through my user's eyes and empathise with the challenges they face every day.

Screenshots have been blurred out as it contains sensitive information

Strategy

The plan of action for the project

Automation and Aided Workflow

Automation of the process and aided workflows to help reduce manual efforts. Guided workflows and use of smart ways of data collection to make the everyday task quicker than earlier.

Standardisation and Unification

Standardisation in ways of data collection to make the documentation process faster and more efficient. The unification of the multiple touchpoints into one singular cohesive system was one of the main objectives of the project.

Transformative Data Collection experience

Instead of just making the manual process digital we aimed at making it smarter. The earlier process was to just write down all the comments under the set questions. The idea was to introduce various range selectors, intuitive data pickers and smart data integration to pull up flights name, airport addresses and product SKUs to make data collection easy and accurate. Bringing standardisation in the KPI would allow to set up of a points system for better evaluation of the stores across the globe.

Mission Statement

How can we build one singular cohesive platform for Area Sales Managers to document and monitor the store's performance, check brand guidelines adherence and effectively manage the store’s repair and maintenance requests? How to empower Sales Directors to monitor sales activities across the world with an ability to slice and dice the sales data as per business requirements?

Visual Design

As the application had a decent amount of data to be shown I used a highly-flexible card structure for better structuring of the content. Estee Lauder’s iconic periwinkle was used as the primary interaction colour throughout the application. I created a standard design system defining multiple card variations, button styles and text styles. This brought consistency to the design and sped up the visual design.

The Solution

The application majorly consisted of these modules. All of these have sub-sections and major interactions under them.

Sales Dashboards

The role-specific customised dashboard allows the content to be always relevant to the user and also adds a layer of security to the sales numbers. The major features of this section are -

Data representation according to the business segregation
Flexibility to filters out statistics based on a particular region, store or even a singular SKU number.
Clickable graph entities to isolate key data points.

Store Checklist

When Area Sales Managers visit a store they no longer have to wait to go back to the office and document all the information. Opening an iPad or a mobile application they can quickly document all the comments, take photos, check out brand guidelines and raise repair requests from this module. The ability to document and submit a store checklist within a few minutes was one of the major successes of the project.

Admin Module

To ensure ELC officials had full control over the system were developed an admin module which helped them in achieving these objectives -

Manage users and their roles and permissions.
Manage the repair request raised by the sales managers.
CMS for all the visual merchandising content.

Due to the nature of the work officials are always on the move from one airport to another and from one store to another. The application is developed for Native iPad, mobile, native android and responsive web. A wide range of platforms gives managers the flexibility to catch up on their tasks even while they are travelling.

Usage flexibility

Delivery

TR-OTM is built in a highly iterative fashion, with reviews and feedback from the product team on daily basis. Invision clickable prototypes were used for presenting/discussing the concept and collecting feedback by mentioning comments on the Invision prototype. Once the designs were finalised, Zeplin was used to give development handoff. All the specs assets, colour and fonts were shared with the development team. As the application was developed in-house I got an opportunity to extensively work closely with the development team. After each release, a dev review was done to ensure that the experience is as per the intended designs.

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