CoEFFICIENT Visits
Make every conversation count.
Overview
Purpose:
District and Field Managers have a tough time managing all of the requests from corporate, and the data for their district stores. We found out through ride-alongs and shadowing our users, that they spent a massive amount of time traveling between locations and juggling huge binders for each store that contained printouts from excel, websites, corporate presentations and emails, etc.
Objective:
To provide our field users a single source of truth where they could go to prep, view performance, see current initiatives and goals from corporate, and conduct and record notes from their store visits that could carry over from visit to visit. By serving up store-unique data and recommendations, we could help the field save time, allowing them to become more consultative at their dealer visits.
Approach:
We worked with a major OEM and identified sixteen Dealer Operations Managers for a pilot group to learn, build, and iterate with over a six-month period.
01_Research
We knew this product would be aimed specifically for users in the field and for anyone who was in charge of 2 or more stores or locations.
Through some initial interviews we had a good sense of the tools they were currently using to juggle their work between locations, which essentially was a hodgepodge of screenshots across different internal websites brought into powerpoint. History of visits were collected into large binders and often stored in their truck as they went from location to location.
I explored apps in the landscape we were exploring such as, but not limited to:
Evernote
Onenote
Google Keep
Paper (Dropbox)
Google Suite
02_User Interviews
We did some preliminary interviews with potential users across several industries to gather a clearer picture of current workflows and tools.
We ended up working directly with a major OEM where they helped identified sixteen Dealer Operations Managers to participate in a pilot group with us where we could learn, build, and iterate with over a six-month period.
03_Define the Problem
After user interviews it was easier to bucket the problems of our users into categories and themes.
They want to spend less time hunting down the data they need
They’d like to know any priorities corporate may have that they should be discussing without having to constantly hunt that information down
A more organized history of not only what they were discussing with their stores, but what others were discussing could help shape conversations from visit to vist.
Workshops help define the problems and brainstorm possibilities.
04_Exploration
Ideas. Ideas. Ideas.
I believe in exploring with whatever tools make sense. Personally, in this stage, it’s about generating as many ideas that help solve your key issues for each user and as a whole.
A huge challenge was not only to solve this problem for our users, but how our solution could fit into the workflows of our other applications such as Dashboards.
A journey always starts with a step.
We started with simple whiteboarding, sketching how we might not only tackle our users problems, but also how we might integrate this new product into our current workflow of apps.
Wireframes
Initially low fidelity mockups were made to present ideas to the internal team and developers. We wanted to make sure we weren’t presenting ideas to our pilot group that weren’t feasible to make on the timelines we had. Once we like a few directions we were heading, we’d take 4-5 different ideas to our pilot users for feedback. We’d present designs in a mixture of groups or individually.
Prototypes
As we fine tuned our mockups I’d eventually move some of the concepts into a clickable prototype using a webapp such as Codepen. This really gave our users a sense of how things would work beyond just flat screens. Apps such as Invision would work well too, and in some cases we used that, but since I had written a style sheet, I could use this time to show developers my expectations as well.
Vision designs help showcase the direction we’d like to move.
Sometimes when building new products you forget that even Gmail had a version 1.0 or the first iPhone didn’t even ship with copy and paste! It’s important to remember that improvement takes time. I often like to create vision designs, to show where I’d love the product to be a few years from now. Of course, even that changes.
We originally had 75% detractors after the first two months of the pilot; we ended with having converted 90% of those to supporters.
We posted bi-weekly to our Community forum to notify users of new and improved changes to the product, based on their specific feedback.
We conducted weekly calls with the stakeholders to ensure the product was progressing and milestones were met.
Our iteration process was driven by our users in the form of bi-weekly feedback calls and user tests.