Discovering the product with the business side
Contextualising the challenges, understanding the strategy and how it works overall, in contact with different project stakeholders
Designing a product like this involves many disciplines. To start our engagement, we organise exploratory interviews with several strategic roles. Each participant brings us a business view that helps us better understand the product and the current and future challenges.
Through these conversations, we identify initial field feedback, recent developments, current questions and the teams’ roadmap. So much useful information to prepare the observations. The diversity of the clients is important, and we select with them the types of shop that are relevant to involve during the observations.
To get even more familiar with the topic, we spend a day in the field, immersed with a sales rep. We meet merchants to present the solution to them. An excellent way to pinpoint the critical points and the strengths of Alma’s value proposition.
Sharing the user knowledge
Centralising the gathered material and making it available to the teams shaping the product
From the very start of the engagement, we structured a shared research repository in Notion to centralise the in-shop conversation recordings, the notes and the photographs.
The whole of our engagement (framing, analysis, results) is therefore documented in a wiki that the different company stakeholders can access. Verbatims, classified by category, are also extracted from the user interviews.
Finally, this “everything in one place” approach fits perfectly with the logic of building a user-knowledge base run by the in-house teams. It also ensures continuity in the future research that will be carried out, on the same topic or on related themes.
Observing real-world use
Observing how the product is used in different usage contexts to identify critical points
Identifying the relevant shops
Going directly to the shop and talking to users right in their context seemed the most fitting approach. So we went to a dozen shops.
To capture the diversity of usage contexts for the solution, we selected very varied business sectors.
Measuring the real experience with the product
Next, we prepare an interview guide that will be used both with managers and with sales staff who use the Alma POS solution. To systematise the data collection, we define an observation grid that lists the different elements to take into account.
In addition to the blockers and the points of satisfaction, the users complete an AttrakDiff. This standardised UX questionnaire lets us assess the Alma experience as a whole (onboarding, day-to-day use, contact with support, etc.). On site, we photograph the layout of the premises and, where applicable, how the Alma solution is showcased to customers.
Testing the model against real uses to optimise it
Mapping the opportunities
Back at the agency, we analyse the data gathered during the business interviews and in-shop observations. We organise a first co-analysis workshop with the project team to show the main results and discuss the different areas for improvement.
During this workshop, we present the model of the interaction journey between sellers and buyers during a sales experience that involves the Alma POS solution. With the product team, we identify five workstreams that correspond to different steps of the user journey.
Feeding the roadmap
Describing the experience types and the associated levers
Following that, we dive back into the data to identify behavioural variables that help characterise sales experiences. We end up with four main types of Alma sales experience. We formulate recommendations tied to the different workstreams for each type of sales experience. Everything is then visually structured, with work on the information architecture. The visuals below are anonymised (in one click thanks to our Adobe XD Loremipsumator plugin) for confidentiality reasons.
