Cloudpick provides enterprise-level users with smart retail and artificial intelligence solutions for innovative payment methods, unmanned stores, and commercial goods. EICO was invited to improve the user experience for its offline flagship store, Wepick, in Shanghai and designed the Wepick app and WeChat mini-app to meet surrounding office workers' needs.
After conducting a in-deepth user research for the unmanned convenience store, we provided strategic design, visual guideline, and prototyped the MVP of the wepick app. We also achieved a long-term partnership with Cloudpick and are responsible for the next step - optimizing their retail experience and future expansion.
UX Designer, UX Researcher
Jun, 2021 - Sep, 2021
Yang Gao, Yuan Chen, Qiutong Lin
Figma, Sketch, Illustrator, Protopie
Placed an order and pick up your lunch at any time, avoiding the wait and crowds.
Order and pick up your snacks & beverages in the locker with your lunch together or at anytime.
Complete registration, bind WeChat payment, and enter the gate in just a few clicks.
We first looked into the market to examine existing products from traditional convience store to emerging unmanned stores.
We analyzed competing products from 5 perspectives, business type, user experience, marketing method, SKU, and membership system, to contribute to futher strategy design.
We designed and distributed screening questionaires to recruit interviewees. Out of the 105 questionnaires collected, 12 users were selected for contextual inquiries.
Then, we conducted contextual inquires with convenience store users with different living habits at Wepick store.
Objectives
- Dive deeper into office workers’ lifestyles and needs
- Understand how consumers behave at convenience stores in different scenarios with various porpuses.
We created an affinity map as a group to identify themes from our qualitative interview data.
We found that wepick users have three main behavior patterns: goal-oriented, coupon seeker, and fashion player.
Results from research
1. We found it convenient to use behavior pattern classification. Because there are multiple scenarios at different times of the day. And every customer can be a mixture of these three behaviors. For example, one may have a clear goal when buying breakfast and becomes fashion players when looking for snacks in the afternoon.
2. It is easy to understand and correlates with daily observations. It communicates our ideas directly to the Wepick team.
Through user research, we divided Wepick convience store's business into 8 scenarios, and in this design phase we focused on the first three scenarios with the highest frequency.
We completed a round of ideation, combining insights from user research with business concerns. Eventually, we converged on a design strategy and three design concepts for Wepick.
The lunch pre-ordering and pickup service was created to meet the needs of our most loyal customers. Users can arrange pick-up periods and place orders ahead of time. They can skip the wait and crowds by picking up their lunch from the pickup counter. In the order status page, we've also provided a link to retail pick-up, so customers can get their lunch, drinks, and snacks all in one place.Pick-up service for lunch will be emphasized.
Depending on market response, we may expand this function to breakfast soon.
Despite the fact that customers desire to buy snacks during peak hours, crowds and their inconvenient lunchboxes frequently force them to give up. Picking up items from lockers can address this problem and save them time. Users can also place pre-orders for new products they want and pick them up as soon as they arrive.
We had a concept about real-time shopping cart on phone and screens in the store. The app version is only intended to serve as a guide for first-time users or those who have doubts. We don't want people checking their phones all the time once they've entered the store. There are a lot of bar displays on the shelves at Wepick, but they aren't connected to the IoT system yet.
Thus, we simplified it into onboarding and guidance for new comers.
After user testing, we held a strategic discussion with the client after proposing our designs. In this phase, we decided to implement the MVP, refining the execution of concepts 1 and 2 to better satisfy the existing food and beverage demands of the main users, in combination with the strategic design.
In 2022, we update the hardware system and design offline screens throughout the retail area to provide a more immersive and fluent shopping experience. We'll combine the upgraded hardware with the design of the IoT system for the retail space in the next stage.
After establishing the basic strategic design and interaction MVP plan, we invited the client team to participate in a visual workshop to develop the visual style of the Wepick App.
Based on the consensus reached in the workshop, we conducted brand design and created a complete design system.
Placed an order and pick up your lunch at any time, avoiding the wait and crowds.
Order and pick up your snacks & beverages in the locker with your lunch together or at anytime.
Complete registration, bind WeChat payment, and enter the gate in just a few clicks.
Based on the consensus reached in the workshop, we conducted brand design and created a complete design system. And we also design the membership system and various homepages for upcoming stores.
As a designer, we should always advocate for users, and spread design thinking during collaborations. Sharing design and research methods and involving other roles into processes could be very helpful to get everyone involved and align our goals. And it would be better for us to collaborate with engineers from the beginning.
I learned to focuse on the big picture through the stages of design, and how to prioritize tasks and make trade-offs to launch an MVP that serves the core needs of core user groups. Also, there are always iterations and the next steps.