Associate Workbench

The Project Overview

Associates at Famous Footwear, Naturalizer, and Sam Edelman have multiple roles in the store. They play keeper of inventory, experts on our products, and the face of the brand for each customer coming into the store. As the Lead UX Designer, I created the strategy and initial prototype for the iPad app.

The Process

I observed multiple store managers and associates to understand their experiences. To truly have empathy for our associates, I performed some of their daily tasks so I could experience their technical painpoints. Through this I learned, that pricing changes are extremely manual and time intensive and we expect our associates to switch between the iPad and desktop computer in order to complete basic inventory assessments.

In the end, we distilled our researched into one problem to focus on:

How might we streamline our associate functions into a simple and fast app for associates to use in-store?

The solutioN

After extensive user interviews, I created a journey map focused on three main functions of an associate: item management, inventory management and task management.

Item Management helps the associate when assisting the customer about product assortment and availability. In the flow below, I refer this as “Product Lookup”. The team wanted to make it easy for associates to quickly find products when assisting customers. I spent numerous hours in stores observing associates and role playing with the managers to make sure the solution would assist the associate, not disrupt it.

Inventory Management involves products coming into the store, leaving the store, and pricing changes. Managing products isn’t solely a digital experience, this requires an innate knowledge of where the delivery service drops the products, how they get onto the shelves, and tracking down each product when a price changes. I interviewed multiple managers and observed how they handled each of these moments.

Task Management is primarily for communication between corporate and a specific store and creating associate nametags.

The outcome

After defining the user journeys, I designed a low fidelity prototype of the navigation to connect these experiences. I then mentored another UX Designer as he created the final designs for the iOS app. After each design iteration, we took the prototypes to the store and tested them with our associates to gain feedback.