Deloitte Case Competition 2020
Finalist, top 4 teams
Project by Vivian Yu, Heidi Lui, Jeanne Shu, Amay Jain
Prototype of our app solution.
My role: UX/UI Designer and Consultant
Project length: 3 weeks
The Deloitte consulting case competition is an extra curricular project which I worked on in April 2020, with my team progressing to the final round. This is still an ongoing project with the finals being held on May 10th 2020. Judging stages for this competition include heats, semi-finals and finals with over 40 teams competing overall.
Brief:
To advise how Supplies Inc, a hardware and building supplies company, can uplift customer experience and visits in store. The solution to this problem can take on any form and must be delivered in a presentation to judges within a 2 week timeframe.
What I learnt from this experience:
- The short timeframe of 2 weeks was incredibly challenging for presenting a feasible and innovative. As such, I was able to develop strong team work skills, regularly communicating with my team every day. I was also able to use my critical thinking skills to challenge the team's ideas so that we could constantly develop and move forward.
- Developed proficiency in UI design by quickly producing app prototypes that could be presented as our solution.
- Developed my ability to deeply consider user experience, as the brief was focused on uplifting customer experience. This also allowed me to consider metrics that the business could use to measure the success of improving this experience.
To begin, my team and I independently conducted market research to understand the problem.
Initial research was conducted independently so that all team members could learn about the market situation in the hardware industry. I also conducted a competitor analysis and recorded different digital solutions that competitors such as Bunnings were using. This helped me understand and define the problem Supplies Inc was facing - that their current offerings were outdated, which lead to a loss of market share.
After initial research, my team gathered to share insights and to produce a matrix for evaluating customer experience.
The production of the matrix to evaluate the customer experience helped direct our solution to ensure that it actually addresses the identified problems. This also helped us focus our thinking and prevented us from designing solutions that didn't address what was intended.
Example from our slide deck showing our customer experience matrix and where Supplies Inc is currently lacking.
Who our solution was targeted for was defined and a persona was created to clearly communicate user needs.
The creation of this persona also enabled us to communicate how the design meets customer needs at each point of the customer journey. After this, the digital app solution was developed and and evaluated against out previous experience matrix.
Due to time constraints, we were not able to conduct primary user research. Instead, we used Roy Morgan survey data and other sources to construct the persona of the ideal DIY customer that undertook projects.
How we communicated this information in the presentation can be found below.
Example of our slide deck portraying the persona, the user journey and how this app solution addresses issues defined by our matrix.
The process of designing the app included identifying the features that address the customer experience matrix and then creating 3 iterations of the prototype.
This allowed us to first define what the app would need to solve the problem presented in the brief as well as compete with the digital solutions of other hardware stores. Multiple iterations were created as we evaluated the user experience after each version by running through it ourselves.
If time constraints weren't as restrictive, each prototype should have been tested with users to ensure that the experience when using the app was seamless and intuitive. This was also a fictional brief so there were limitations in testing the product.
Despite the fictional nature of the brief, a method that could be used to test this could include 'think aloud', where users would complete a task, such as making a purchase in the app. Participants would the voice their thoughts as they navigate the app and this would be recorded by the designer to identify points of confusion, errors or strengths in the design.
First app iteration and customer journey created by my team member. The most recent version is seen in the image above.
Second app iteration created by me after defining a lack of clarify in initial features.
The third iteration of this app included push notifications, removal of the aisle finder feature and some colour changes. This was decided by the team due to time constraints of the presentation and the need to prioritise key features that directly linked to our customer experience matrix.
I was then responsible for defining KPIs that would demonstrate strategy success and considered ways to evaluate user experience.
These metrics were chosen to provide evidence of an improved customer experience in terms of business success. To assess the user experience of the app post launch, customer feedback forms, app reviews and conversion rates could be observed to identify strengths, customer frustrations and how successfully a user is able to complete their task on the app.
