search for products

Problem space

My actual squad's main objective is to reduce friction in the service that we provice inside the stores, with focus on the digital product tool that the attendants use to serve our customers. This tool is very old and has several solutions that were implemented at different times and with different technical limitations that are no longer an issue today, and that's why it generates several problems in the store, specially for the counter attendants search for the products for our clients. So this was the cuttout that was defined to be changed because its experience was time-consuming and full of flaws, often leading to not being able to find the desired product and bringing a terrible experience for our customers in the stores.

Exploration

Duided by the results of a CSD matrix dynamics that I facilitated, me and the squad's product manager defined some of the main points to be explored, which were:

• Finding out what makes the attendant stop using the system and go get the product directly from the shelf, as we had a high number of searches by barcode reading (around 2/3 of the searches)
• The difficulty that not being able to search for terms that were similar could caused
• The difficulty of finding the products because there is a lot of information that needs to be visible because it is essential for the consumer to make his purchase decision

I did a round of interviews with 16 attendants of different levels of seniority and in stores with very different profiles, and we did a shadowing observing the I observed around 72 attendments. The results validated that search was a big problem. The results showed that the attendants have the perception that the system is slow because it is necessary to load two full pages until it is possible to access the information that is fundamental to be passed to our customers, and also the lack of a more efficient search system that could retrieve results with simple errors such as a few wrong characteres, makes the attendant have to search several times if he does not know the product name correctly. So these were the two main issues that made the attendant not use the system, which created bigger problems in the store, as products ended up off the shelves or it was necessary to go get other products on the shelf when a customer decided to buy another option. The difficulty of finding products in our current lists wasn't a big problem after all, but we swa that could became if changes were made to solve the other two problems.

Solutions

I developed three main solutions that could be worked on separately by the squad and would have impact alone but mainly together.

First we decided to implement a new search engine. As this new search engine could generate more products appearing as results, it was necessary to make the screens more efficient. One of the simplest possibilities was implementing filters for the most importants informations that guide the customer's buying decision, and this way help the attendant to find the right product in a easier way. In this solution I developed the new flow architecture, tested it with low-fidelity prototypes and passed it on to the other squad designer who is focused only in UI. The second solution we defined was creating a search field that we called "quick search, which would quickly bring up some product options while the attendant types. I designed this solution, in addition to the entire definition process, and as my counterpart was working in the other UI, Ié worked in this one and assisted the development team through the implementation.

Outcome

At the moment we are still developing parts of the solution and running some parts that are ready in some pilot stores to follow the usage and how we can improve what was developed