Retail app network
Client: Microsoft
Role: Design lead (UX, UI, product design, information architecture, writing, strategy).
Collaboration: Support designers, project managers, copy writers, development teams, and leadership
Delivering great content at a global scale
Microsoft Stores feature a wide variety of first- and third-party products. To effectively demonstrate product features, I created a wide range of educational frameworks and creative apps. Each app and framework delivered a unique type of content or experience. I integrated all these experiences together with a central CMS app and sharing utility. Stores around the world could then pull the correct content for their region, and make sure their apps were up to date with relevant content for their customers. As customers interacted with the experiences, a utility completed the system to push content directly to their devices in a PII compliant way.
Research data
Discovery revealed that previous experience apps were inefficient. They were expensive to create and then quickly obsolete. There wasn't an existing way to update the applications with new content.
I found that several legacy apps provided redundant services. I was constantly looking for ways to simplify and streamline the family of services by combining software when possible.
With the new self-serve CMS I designed, stores could set their devices quickly and with greater flexibility. The previous process of deploying apps to store devices was took much more time and was error-prone.
As I designed and deployed apps through the new system, user engagement was carefully tracked. These reports revealed situations where activation was high but not click-through to the business goals. I adjusted the UX to break up bottle necks in these situations.
Building a library of experiences
By templatizing the content for each experience, training content creators on how to properly create new creative, and networking the apps to a central CMS, I greatly reduced the energy needed to support our international stores throughout the year. Also, I improved the consistency of the visual language and content quality with a well-defined process and unified strategy. Each app and experience took time to fine-tune. We launched initial builds that were refined as we measured their performance.
Delivering great content in a compliant way
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) can be a challenge in the retail environment. To be legally compliant, we can't casually collect this type of data from customers and this restricted the types of interactions we could build into experiences. I designed a utility that provided a workaround for our apps. When we wanted to transfer information or content from a retail device to a customer device, Send2Me bridged the gap in a compliant way. Using QR codes, numerical codes, and individual web instances, users could engage in experiences with complete anonymity.
Results
This solution has provided consistent design across countless experiences and made deployment much easier for multiple teams. This system ran for two years and greatly improved the content in Microsoft stores, while reducing efforts needed to maintain it.