Shopping in a limited retail space presents unique challenges, especially when regulations bar you from displaying products to consumers. With our retail kiosks we set out to create an experience that would easily allow consumers to explore the full range of a shop’s products, discover new products that they might enjoy via a game or quiz, and check them out in an easy, painless manner.
Human Factors, Legal Factors
We initially wanted to gamify the educational slice of the kiosks, as the 43″ models especially presented a great opportunity for a visually-engaging and fun experience. We enthusiastically began designing and experimenting with digital and paper mockups to see what could work.
We quickly realized that although a 43″ panel offered a great opportunity for a showy game, there were some serious human factors to consider. I built a whiteboard prototype at the height the panels were mounted at, then conducted a hallway study to see where people could comfortably read and interact with the panel within an arm’s reach. Because the sample size was small, I measured where they could reach in relative to their own body, then created the design guidelines below. These findings, combined with low-fi testing, led to us pivoting to the 22″ kiosk models.
Client
Fyllo & Semasio
Responsibilities
Consumer Insights & Discovery, Competitive Analysis, Planning & Scope Definition, UX Design, Usability Studies, Human Factors
Approach
I conducted interviews and job shadows with customers, salespeople and consumers so that we could better understand the unique challenges they faced with the current shopping experience and product exploration. We learned:
- On average, consumers only shop once a month because of the high friction involved (primarily because it takes a long time and industry regulations around how much they can buy
- Because of the time commitment and purchasing limitations, consumers are hesitant to explore new product
Regardless of the brand, consumers didn’t trust salespeople for recommendations: “They just want to upsell you instead of helping you.”
From there we set three goals: the experience should inspire confidence in a consumer’s choices, it should be fast & easy, and it should encourage exploration.
Making It Easy For Everyone
Between the discovery research and the competitive analysis, I had plenty of inspiration to draw from for the initial set of wireframes.
After removing the game elements and leaning into progressive disclosure, we had our quiz simplified down to a single page. From there, we created a clean, black & white base design system that allowed our clients to apply their own brand upon.
A Few Tweaks, Then Shipped
As big fan of sharing my findings and emojis, I published the high-level results to Slack with a link to the in-depth results on Confluence:
In subsequent tests, the taxonomy updates from the card-sorting study resolved the mental model issues we were seeing. It was ready to ship, and a week later my team was let go.