At home
Explore.
Search. Prepare.
Browse offers, search for products, maintain lists and prepare a shopping trip.
The next shopping trip
01 Understanding the context
Understanding purchase decisions
where they happen.
Store Mode starts with the people in the store.
I began by reviewing the existing app and proposing UX improvements. We also used our proximity to the MediaMarkt store in Ingolstadt to talk to customers and test concepts in the shopping environment.
Those conversations revealed specific needs: advice, product information and comparisons with available alternatives. Later concept tests showed that the in-store assortment mattered more than initially expected.
The product questionHow can the app help at the moment a customer is standing in front of a product?
02 Building shared understanding
A shared view
of customer value.
Before defining features, we made needs and assumptions explicit.
I ran Value Proposition Design and persona workshops with the product team. We distilled customer motivations into mini-personas, completed Value Proposition Canvases and formulated hypotheses about customer value.
This gave us a concrete question for each product idea: who would benefit from this feature, and which need would it address?
From motivations to models
The mini-personas and hypotheses were working models for discussing ideas and making them specific enough to test.
03 Product concept
One app.
Two shopping contexts.
Store Mode would adapt the experience to shopping in store.
Explore.
In store
The product in front of me.
The information I need.
Use product information, reviews and alternatives at the point of decision.
The decision in store
The digital shelf concept
Bringing digital filters and comparisons to the physical shelf.
I proposed a scannable shelf that would add digital selection tools to the store. One example: standing in front of the printers, filtering for AirPrint support and sorting suitable models by price.
Later documents show the shift from scanning a shelf to scanning a product. The individual item and its price label became the starting point.
04 Testing with customers
A good concept must
make sense in store.
The tests revealed both the value customers wanted and friction in the flow.
5–6 July 2016 · Ingolstadt
15 customer interviews
High-fidelity prototype focused on shelf scanning
6–7 September 2016 · Nuremberg
18 customers interviewed
Proof-of-concept app with barcode scanning on price labels
Exploratory in-store tests. In Nuremberg, two additional people who did not use smartphones were also recorded.
Customers wanted product information and comparisons. But useful features alone were not enough: the entry points and interactions also needed to be clear. The Nuremberg findings document three specific problems.
Finding 01
Alternatives were overlooked.
The entry point to other items in the same category was not noticeable enough on the product detail page.
Finding 02
Comparing was too cumbersome.
Customers wanted the feature, but its flow did not yet fit the Store Mode context well enough.
Finding 03
Scanning needed guidance.
It was unclear which barcode or part of the price label the camera should capture.
Original screens from the test findings. They show the design tested at the time, not the current app.
05 Detailed design
From concept
to a connected flow.
The experience takes shape between screens.
I translated the Store Mode idea into flows and interaction details. The complete flow connects different entry points with permissions, the store home, scanning, product views and next steps. It also makes the boundaries of the initial scope explicit.
The detail below shows how a later iteration introduces the value and guides customers into scanning: from the promise through the store view and a tutorial to the camera.
