Requirements and Research
The sales team at a major fintech company were having a hard time demonstrating to potential customers how their hardware and software products would work within a hospitality space. They wanted to highlight the customer journey through the app as well as the physical space of a store or restaurant.
After talking with key stakeholders and leadership to narrow down their ultimate goals for this new sales tool with a few workshop sessions, my team and I got to work.
Some artifacts from the workshops we held virtually over Mural.
Ideation
I put my storyboarding skills to work (I used to be a storyboard artist for the film and tv industry) and drew out the journey our users (the sales team) would take when demonstrating the company's offerings to new customers.
My service design colleague worked on the script that the sales team would use and I used that as a guide to start to identify the pieces that would need to be produced to create the final product that would help them achieve their goals, which were:
- Show where and when users would see key UI screens
- Allow customers to click through happy path flows and imagine themselves in the end user's shoes as they made their journey around the store.
- Show how specific hardware solutions (kiosk, mobile or touchless) would be used along the journey
Service design workshops helped my team and I identify the story the sales team would need to tell to potential customers to help them wrap their head around a fairly complex journey with a bunch of steps happening concurrently.
Work in progress visuals were shared and the stakeholders gave feedback which drove several iterations of the 3D modeling and prototypes along the journey.
Design Process
My team and I realized that our final product would require the following pieces:
- Figma prototypes of key flows that users could explore available on any network
- a generic store 3D environment that could be "walked through"
- touchpoint and feature clearly outlined in the navigation so the presenter would not forget a step
- predefined camera angles that would best showcase the hardware in the context it was being used
All this would need to be able to be displayed on a very wide variety of devices on a variety of network speed conditions as our research showed that the sales team met customers on planes, trains, showroom floors...not just an environment with high speed internet.
Prototype and Environment Modeling
We modeled props and environments with SketchUp and then used ShapeSpark to add the touchpoint camera angles and navigation. I also created some people models to help make the environments seem a little more lively.
Once the hardware models were in place, I linked my Figma prototypes to them so you could display them in a larger window and click through them from there.
User Testing and Iteration
Throughout the design and build process, we tested the product with small groups of sales teams locally and those abroad (we wanted to make sure it would work for our international users as well).
These testing sessions would show us that some changes needed to be made to the 3D environments to make them more realistic (such as equipment placement) and some data on the prototypes needed to be tweaked to help tell a stronger story (a realistic modifier menu for a hamburger being ordered by the customer, for example).
After holding probably 6+ rounds of feedback sessions and iterations with the sales team, we launched a beta edition.
Result
The beta alone won five figures of new reoccurring revenue for the company in the first few weeks it was released! It was a huge success and was even featured in the company's all hands annual meeting by leadership.