The Challenge
Marbles the Brain Store asked me to join their team for the 2016 holiday season to design and build an app to be used by their "Brain Coaches" to assist in sales of games to customers.
The app was initially to include product videos for Brain Coaches to share with customers in the course of selling, and a game finder to expand their go-to assortments of products. Longer-term, the intent was a digital transformation of the customer experience through the integration of online and in-store experiences.
This was a fun project for me - a return to my design and development roots and a chance to brush up on some skills that I hadn’t used recently.
My Contributions
Digital Strategy Assessment
Requirements Analysis
User Research
User Experience Design
User Interface Design
Front-end Development
Project Management
Analytics Reporting
Understanding Context + Needs
Marbles requested an app to meet a very specific set of needs, in the context of a previously-established digital strategy for stores. To get started, I set out to understand Marbles' processes, challenges, in-flight initiatives, and aspirations, at a high level, to ensure that the app would support Marbles’ longer-term digital vision.
Requirements + Design
Throughout analysis and design, I documented user stories to be addressed both initially and in the future. My first designs were expansive, including functionality not ultimately included in the app. For the holiday season, we built the "minimum acceptable product" (the design at the top of this page): a landing page from which to access videos, a simple "game finder," a means to find related online-only products for a handful of in-store products, a promotion calendar, and a quick reference for the new "Brain Types" (new game categories recently introduced).
integrating the app into the in-store Experience
Because of our limited initial scope, we needed a simple way to both remind Brain Coaches which products had videos available in the app, and let customers know that they could request to see videos for these products to learn more about them. We did this with stickers applied to products’ information cards.
Analytics + Adjustments
In order to understand how Brain Coaches were using the app, I tagged it to gather very detailed interaction information using Google Analytics events. We tracked activity throughout the holiday season to learn how the app was being used and identify any areas that needed improvement.
