DIGITIZING THE PRINTING BUSINESS FOR SHOPKEEPERS
An attempt to bring Xerox shops online
OVERVIEW
The partner web app is the partner platform for shopkeepers to receive and manage printouts from students and other users. It was designed to provide an online shop presence as well as improve business productivity and complete customer relationship management for the shopkeepers.
Our team started the ideation process with some design goals, conducting thorough market research, interviewing and surveying the shopkeepers to find out their pain points. Then, moving on to the design phase, we started working on some wireframes and mockups that we built in close coordination with the shopkeepers and rapidly iterating our designs to tune them to the needs of the shopkeepers. Finally, even as we entered the development phase, we kept beta testing our prototypes to incorporate inclusive objectivity from the shopkeepers.
A strategic and enjoyable research and design process that happened over 3 weeks, I walked away with a mountain of experience and solutions that helped all the stakeholders achieve their respective business goals.
MY ROLE
I led the entire product design and development of the partner web app during its development lifecycle.
After a strategic and enjoyable research and design process that lasted for over 6 months, I walked away with a mountain of experience and solutions that helped all the stakeholders achieve their respective business goals.
BREAKING DOWN THE DESIGN PROCESS
We started by brainstorming effective design goals at the intersection of the business requirements and customer value.
The design goals we formulated were -
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Digital management platform for shopkeepers to conduct their printing business.
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Printing interface to control and use the shop printers via the platform.
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Communication means with customers online for receiving files for printing.
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Easy shop setup for onboarding new shopkeepers via the platform.
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Managing payment and receipt related business requirements directly through the platform.
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Simple, quick and effective conflict and query resolution
From the Design to the Future Roadmap
By brainstorming and prioritizing ideas in terms of efficiency, we quickly came to a roadmap with the next steps, focusing not just on the website, but also on the organization itself – I believe that a strong organization is more likely to create strong products and services.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
So far, there were no comparable product offerings, so our research applied to products from the field of hyper local delivery and dual partnership businesses, preferably with a focus on logistics and the target consumer groups of 20 to 40 year olds.
The creation of competitive profiles (in terms of marketing strategy, target market, core business, usability, layout, navigation structure, compatibility, content, design and performance) together with SWOT analysis helped to assess current offers in this area.
In this case, the main goal was to gather information for creating the future website design and to allow objective discussions about it. Our entire ideation and research process centered on market insights, user interviews, surveys, prototyping, beta testing and finally the UI design.
INTERVIEWS AND SURVEYS
My cofounder, Sayan and I spent over a week interviewing and surveying the shopkeepers from our college. The shopkeepers also owned another print shop in a nearby area and that allowed us to gain multiple insights from both the shops. Some of the guiding questions we used during the interviews were -
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What problems do you face while catering to your customers?
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At what time of the day and week is the shop most crowded?
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What problems do you face while getting mails from customers for printouts?
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Who are your most valuable customers?
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How do you presently communicate the status of the print orders you receive and promotions and discounts to your customers?
MARKET RESEARCH
We used a combination of online research material and interview data to gather user pain points. We used an organized effort to gather information about our target markets and customers. We considered it a very important component of combining business requirements with the design strategy and a major factor in maintaining robustness. We came up with some useful insights that we could translate into design opportunities.
THESE WERE SOME MAJOR LEARNINGS WE WANTED TO CALL OUT
Loss of customers due to inefficient printing and stationery services
Huge untapped product opportunity for a one-stop, highly customised printing solution for improving business productivity for print shop owners. The lack of a digital management platform leads to inefficient printing services and loss of customer retention due to crowding and jumbling at the shop during rush periods.
Disorganised system makes it harder to gather accurate data
The opportunity for an organised system to manage the network of partnered printout shops, the experience from each shop providing the data to make the system even more optimized for the whole network, leading to a better informed and more data-driven product design.
Lack of a medium to promote offers and discounts to users
Shop discovery of nearby print shops depends on Google Maps which does an inefficient role of promoting any offers or discounts provided time and again by different shops. This therefore leads to the opportunity for designing a more functional and highly customised shop discovery system.
USER PERSONA
We created a fictional representation of an ideal print shop owner. We started the design process by conducting user research—building empathy with our target users and identifying exactly what they need from the product we’re designing. A persona was built based on this user research which incorporated the needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns of the print shop owner.
TASK ANALYSIS
The very first thing we needed to do was to ask the key question: What problems are we trying to solve? Problem-oriented thinking provides structure to the entire design process. Once you start thinking in terms of problems, the specific solutions will automatically follow.
For the Sleefax Partner platform, the entire inventory and order management process are centered around automating and organizing the process of receiving and printing multiple files from users.
There’s a lot of complexity here. For example, printout orders contain a lot of information. Imagine you order printouts from our platform. If you’re ordering a lot of printouts with individual formats and printing instructions. Depending on various factors, like the number of copies, page size, orientation, color or B/W of the package, and the availability of service, some printouts may be delivered at different times.
The seller needs to keep track of which of those items have been printed and which are yet to be printed, which have been paid for, and which have been delivered. Multiple items are often placed into a single order, while there are also orders with a different set of printing requirements. All of these things need to be tracked.
We determined our most crucial user goals from this data and the number of steps (or tasks) that a user must complete to get to the objective.
Using task analysis we broke down our most important user goals into a series of subtasks, by doing this we were able to dig into the user experience and draw insights that helped us to design the product.
WIREFRAMES
With low-fidelity paper prototypes, the planned syllabus and the general structure of the application could easily be tested in usability tests. Without much effort, adjustments could be made before going into the much more costly digital implementation.
FOR ONBOARDING THE SHOPKEEPER
FOR ORDER MANAGEMENT
FINAL UI DESIGN
Designing the Onboarding and Order Fulfillment process
A simple and easy onboarding process was designed so that shopkeepers can join the platform effortlessly while ensuring all the required information is uploaded into the system from shop details and location to shop-pricing and timings.
For designing the order fulfillment process we had a lot of ideas but we couldn’t sneak in everything before launch. The tile view was one of the major ideas that we decided to stick with.
Sometimes an overworked customer simply needs the answer to the question: Where the heck is my order? When you order something on Amazon, at any point in time, you can know exactly where your package is. Has it been dispatched? Is it in transit? When will it be delivered?
When you’re handling print-related orders, you’ll need to answer these questions for possibly hundreds of orders that are at different stages of the order cycle.
Did the shopkeeper receive my files? Is my order being printed? Is it ready for pickup?
We ensured that at every step of the process the user was notified of his current order status simultaneously by connecting both the customer app and the user website.
USABILITY TESTING
The main goal of usability testing was to ensure that our prototype works, to find out how self-explanatory things are and if a shopkeeper of average ability or experience can use it.
Why was it important?
When solving complex problems it is always good to get validation early so we can course-correct if needed. On our existing prototype, we identified bottleneck points and allowed the team to gain fresh eyes.
What did we test?
We focused on testing both functionality and design.
DESIGNER - ENGINEER COLLABORATION
Being a UI/UX designer and front-end engineer myself I knew that if I do not follow-through work with engineers after sending deliverables, there’s a possibility that the final product may look like total crap, completely different from the design delivered in the first place. And if that’s the case, all my hard work is wasted.
I spent a good amount of time working with engineers and coding many of the front end frameworks myself to make sure that the design is implemented correctly, and make adjustments if needed.
What matters at the end is how the final user experience is going to be, ideally as close as possible to the original design that I worked so hard on and tested with users.
A beautiful prototype created by a UX designer does not provide any value to customers if it’s not implemented at all as a real product. Therefore, design handoff was not the end but the beginning of my implementation phase, which directly impacted the quality of the final product.
LAUNCH
We had already partnered up with 2 shops in and around the college who were eager to test our product. We simultaneously launched the Sleefax customer app in our department and provided the final Sleefax web app to the shopkeepers. We had around 250 users within the first 3 days of launch who signed up organically and used our app for taking printouts instead of facing the usual rush at the print shop. That happiness didn't last long as the coronavirus pandemic took place causing the schools and colleges to close along with our dreams.
TITLE OF THE CALLOUT BLOCK
LESSONS LEARNED
#1 Big challenges require small steps
Take small steps, because big changes can not be brought overnight, especially not just by an application alone. Accordingly, develop more strategically meaningful and realistically applicable tools that steer in the intended direction.
#2 Be open to research and let ideas go
I thought too digitally and approached the product with too concrete ideas about the result, thus failing to correctly take into account some needs and challenges of the target group and thus unfavorably defined the minimum viable product.
#3 Interview questions chosen unfavorably
Looking back, I would rebuild the interviews differently as I used too many questions where interviewees should imagine what the optimal solution might be (for example, “describe your dream solution”). It would have needed further interviews with the shopkeepers to create a more complete picture.