A streamlined Ops workflow to improve the in-store customer’s experience

Summary

7-Eleven has a nationwide network of “Field Consultants” (supervisors) who monitor and verify the performance of their physical stores. The business wanted to streamline its workflow so that it could spend more time coaching store owners and improving their KPIs.

Team & Role

Senior UX Designer in collaboration with a Lead UX Designer, Product Owner and an Engineering Lead.

I was responsible for running user interviews, remote whiteboarding sessions, creating user flows, testing prototypes with users and handing off hi-fidelity designs to Engineering.

Problem

Field consultants were spending an excessive amount of time planning their schedules without sufficient visibility into the performance of their assigned stores. This resulted in wasted hours per day and missed opportunities to improve the stores’ KPIs. Additionally, the process of compiling data from multiple internal systems was a hassle.

The goal was to make it easier and more efficient for supervisors to identify which stores required the most attention. This would allow them to spend the majority of their time coaching store owners instead of planning schedules.

Challenges

• The new application had to be migrated from a legacy system without disrupting operations.
• Both desktop and mobile use cases had to be supported by the web app.
• The interface had to be built modularly as to show/hide functionality depending on the user role and its privileges.

Solution

A responsive web-based application that allows field consultants to see which stores require their attention, schedule their visits, document store performance, and stay up to date with national or regional retail strategies to communicate to their assigned stores.

Designed features include:

• Store performance dashboards with multiple user roles management
• Location-based store insights reports
• Field consultant agenda management: Inspection scheduling, checklists management

Process overview

Given the complexity of this project, multiple remote interviews were required to understand the needs of both users and the business.

1. Understand: Stakeholder and current users interviews. Mappinging of current field consultants workflows; legacy information architecture; unmet needs and existing pain points of both users and the business.
2. Ideating: Whiteboarding with the team; wireframing of potential solutions.
3. Planning: Roadmapping migration steps to minimize operations disruption in collaboration with the Product Owner and Design Lead.
4. Prototype and testing: Mid-fidelity prototype using Sketch + Invision. Usability testing with users.
5. Implement: Hand-off to development team using Zeplin for detailed specs.

Results

• The department’s critical workflows were successfully consolidated into a single application.
• Field consultants spent significantly less time at their desks and about twice as much time coaching store owners.
• The number of Field Consultants store visits increased 35% per week.
• Two development teams were able to be reassigned to other projects, since development efforts were focused on a single application.