Contributions

UX Designer, Visual design lead (in collaboration with offshore front-end developer and visual designer).

Measuring success

• We delivered an MVP application that addressed all the requirements identified in the focus area of ‘Managing the Everyday’ as well as a few features from the “Engaging the customer” focus area.

• The lead dietitians that we worked with were all very pleased with the application and saw a lot of value-added for them.

"This app would be a transformation improvement over how we do our work today!” - Loblaw dietitian

• The business leaders, which included the IT-business engagement manager, business integration lead and director of the wellness program agreed to continue forward with an approach of multiple pilot iterations.

Problem

Early dietitian program was not set up adequately for in-store dietitians to be effective and productive and was seeking rationalization for further investments for in-store dietitian program

Our client, a large Canadian grocery chain company, recently rolled out a program for select stores to have in-store dietitians. Within the initial years of running the program, it was quickly apparent that there were areas of improvement - particularly to streamline operational tasks and equip dietitians with the tools that they needed for customer consultations. These dietitians manage a variety of activities including in-store nutrition events, cooking demos and one-on-one consultations, most of which had information tracked digitally and manually. They needed a solution to support managing their tasks, track customer information and manage the multiple calendar events of which they were responsible.

research

Understanding a dietitian’s daily activities through a contextual Inquiry

A big part of understanding how dietitians managed their everyday tasks was understanding it from the context of their physical workplace. As a part of the discovery phase, we carried out a contextual inquiry, in which we asked questions about specific tasks, observed the manner at which documents were handled and the different points of communication made throughout the day. We also observed where dietitians presented in-store demos which gave us insight to the physical constraints of their workspace for particular tasks and the importance of having particular pieces of information readily available.

UNDERSTANDING

Mapping learnings from contextual inquiry to a user journey

From there, the next step was taking everything I learned from the contextual inquiry and map out touch points where a dietitian might interact with our application to give us ideas on what a potential solution might look like.

Opportunities

Identified improvement areas and opportunities

Observations made through the contextual inquiry helped us identify three core categories of pain points as part of dietitians' day-to-day activities. As the UX designer on the team, I worked closely with the product management team and client stakeholders to define feature details that would address these pain-points and present these ideas through high-fidelity wireframes. The following screens highlight the different components of the solution.

We eventually narrowed down to focusing on the category of Managing the Everyday for a couple of reasons:

• This area had the most value and impact to a dietitian's daily tasks since these are the areas that they spent the most time in

• Addressing the dietitians' everyday tasks had a direct impact on the customer experience

• A way for us to make direct impact on metrics that were most important to the business - program performance metrics

design

Sketches

Based on our understanding of dietitians' daily activities and the typical tools used to carry out certain tasks, I started to sketch out initial ideas. These sketches generated ideas on how we can address these features based on the needs we were hearing and they were then translated to high-fidelity wireframes.

As we iterated on the design, with further discussions with the dietitian and business, we uncovered additional complexities that influenced the direction of the design. For example, we learned that some dietitians were responsible for multiple stores and this changed the way they would manage their tasks.

Added complexities:

• Multiple store assignments per dietitian

• Multiple facets of content searches

• Dietitian view vs. Customer view

• Capturing KPI (key performance indicators) on the fly

• Self-service options (when dietitian is not available)

• Differentiating free time vs. personal time on calendar.

design

High-fidelity wireframes

To align with the timeline that was set for the proof-of-concept and to ensure the solution was able to deliver on the minimum viable product, all designs were created as high-fidelity wireframes. This helped our stakeholders envision the product and helped speed up development efforts as we were working against the Microsoft XAML framework. Below are wireframes from the main areas of focus that expanded on the improvement area of 'Managing the Everyday': calendar management, customer self-service scheduler, content library and KPI management.

 The solution was partitioned into four main areas: calendar management, customer self-service scheduler, content library and KPI Management. This includes managing appointment requests from a wide range of sources in a single calendar view, searching for and managing content in relation to upcoming events, tracking performance and turning the tablet into a customer-friendly mode for event scheduling & sign-up.

Calendar management

Calendar view | View all meeting types in one consolidated calendar view, Filter based on meeting location.

Respond to meeting requests and schedule meetings | Respond to meeting requests coming from wide range of sources, Schedule any meeting type directly into your calendar.

View customer profile | View customer profile details related to meeting selected.

Customer self-service scheduler

Schedule meetings | Allow customers to schedule meetings directly on dietitians' calendars, Dietitians can define which calendar slots are exposed to customers as available.

Sign-up for events | Expose events to customer for which they can sign up.

Easy-to-grasp user experience | Touch-friendly targets and concise information per screen facilitates intuitive navigation.

Content library

Search statement | Drill down on search through filters built into the search statement, Filter across categories that are relevant to the specialist's role.

Open and annotate documents | After opening documents from the library view, use Surface Pen for intuitive annotating.

Organize content | Tag documents to specific customer profiles and meetings, Access a consolidated content view dedicated to a meeting or customer. 

KPI management

KPI dashboard | Instance performance overview against identified KPI targets, Clear visual cues to areas that require more attention and/or data input.

KPI details | Deep-dive into a particular KPI for more granular performance metrics, including a historical view.

Enter performance data | The app automatically captures KPI input (such as # of meetings) and lets you manually enter any additional data where needed.

Success factors and learnings

• Accounting for online and offline experiences.

• Deciding visual layouts for the dashboard with the focus of telling a story with the data - connecting data to its context in the business and needs of the viewer.

• Balancing data consumption and user needs (granular view vs. overview) by revealing details as needed.