Making kiosks the go-to tool for shoppers

Client

Uniqlo

Agency

Scoop Retail & Glue

Role

Director of Product & Experience

Timeframe

May 2018 - Aug 2018

Overview

Background

Uniqlo is a modern clothing apparel company with stores across the world. Already at the forefront of converging physical and digital experiences, they sought to reimagine their in-store digital kiosk experience. Uniqlo had chosen their technology partner, Scoop Retail, who in turn asked me to partner with them to lead the redesign.

Challenge

Uniqlo's current kiosk was built on legacy systems and in turn, an overly complicated experience. The challenge was to reimagine a simplified and modernised experience and introduce features commonly found on their ecommerce website so customers could make in-store purchases, returns, and manage their orders. At the same time, Uniqlo required the ability to curate merchandising and advertising space to their benefit and purchase trends.

My role

My role was seemingly simple; understand best practices, competitor successes, and customer behaviours so I could craft an experience and user journeys that make every day shopping tasks more convenient to complete at the kiosk, rather than the till. Of course, consideration to interaction design, information architecture, and user interface design were required, followed by rigorous usability testing.

Services

Market Research
User Research
Participant Recruitment
Competitor Analysis
Experience Review
Touchpoint Analysis
User Experience Design
User Interface Design
Prototyping
Customer Validation
Usability Testing

Deliverables

Research Plans
Research Reports
Journey Maps
Wireframes
Design Systems
Screen Designs
Prototypes
Design Specifications

Solution

Kiosk experience redesign

I tackled the redesign in three phases. The first was to become familiar with how other companies were using in-store digital kiosks. This meant hitting my local high street and playing with as many kiosks as I possible could, taking notice of the experience, interactions, and observing shoppers using them. I also sparked up conversation with around 20 or so shoppers to understand their perception and experience using the kiosks.

Once I had completed my field research and mystery shopper experience, it was time to start aligning customer pains, needs, and desired outcomes with the technology platform capabilities and ecommerce best practices. From this I was able to define the information architecture, map the user journeys, and create wireframes of common tasks and journeys. At this point, I conducted some customer validation, mixing usability testing, task analysis, and user interviews to find certainty in the proposed solution.

With the feedback from the customer validation, I was able to make any fixes to the experience and journeys, and started to pull together a kiosk-specific design system, full of components and styles. With how I had created the original wireframes, it was rapid process to realise a mid fidelity prototype to test once again with users. The exact same study plan was used and results quickly came in. With minimal changes, all I had to do now was create the design spec and complete the developer handover.

The checkout design for the Uniqlo in-store, digital kiosk.

A man is interacting with the Uniqlo in-store digital kiosk, looking for a new jacket.

Conclusion

Delivered in a short amount of time, the kiosk redesign was deemed a success. This was the second kiosk I had designed, so there were already a lot of learnings implemented into this process. But nevertheless, different markets and customer base require nuanced approaches. Testing the prototypes proved interesting, especially as the recruitment criteria was strict, needing to test with users on an iPad to best replicate the final kiosk hardware and interactions, albeit slightly smaller in size.