Both Ordering System- Research

TL;DR: As a UX/UI Designer, I led the redesign of 7-11's inventory system to address key pain points such as slow, confusing workflows, and difficulty identifying discrepancies. The project focused on helping store managers close their books daily by simplifying data processes and improving variance identification. Using empathy interviews, user flows, and journey maps, I created mockups and new design systems for internal tools. The redesign allowed users to view item-level variances, search specific items, and filter data, improving the overall user experience and operational efficiency.

Description

GES is a a global full-service provider for live events. GES guide the customers every step of the way from concept to completion through post show assessment and analysis. GES developed a system call Expresso, that helps exhibitors plan and organize every aspect of their show.

Challenge

Expresso is an online system where their customers are able to rent all types of articles like booths, carpet, tables, chairs and other furnishings. But with these rentals they have also to complete other tasks like order and plan material handling, choose a freight to ship to the show or a near warehouse and order extra utilities (like Electrical Rental, plumbing, installation of signs, etc) and after all these decisiones are made go through a checkout and pay for all items. 

So there is a lot of cognitive decisions for the customers to order online everything that is needed to participate with a booth display in a show with GES.GES as business want to make everything easier and clear to the customers so they don’t have to worry on anything the day of the show.  Also something very important to GES is reduce the number of calls to customer service,  they ate aware that they provide excellent service on this channel and they want to replicate this excellence at the online orders.

• Role: Research and UX Designer

• Team: Manager, UI and UX

• Stakeholders : GES UX Designer, Technology Director and Customer and Services Leader, and Digital Market Team

• Out of Scope: New Image Catalogue, Technical Requirements 

• Process: Design Thinking Method with Qualitative Research provided by client

Research

Personas were already provided by client GES, but we want it to understand the context and the main goals, needs and pain points from each type of customer so we were provided with call interviews that gave us a lot of these learnings:

Main Goals and Needs:

• Re-order booth from last year

• Compare prices to deliver a budget to client

• Compare packages, sizes and prices for the booth to make the best decision

Main Pain-points:

• The process is very time consuming because of the system navigation

• Checkout: there is no guided process, customer has to checkout blindly.

• Worried about deadlines and extra costs

• Customers have to do a lot of research and read a lot of documentation to understand requirements from each show

• Customers don't trust anyone helping them in shipping or drayage, they prefer to monitor everything by themselves.

Empathy Maps

We also were provided with a lot of data that helped us to analyze deeply the features and the interaction with the system. We followed the next process:

We converted a large spreadsheet of data into categories that would helped us reveal common themes, problems, pain points and patterns. We learned new insights to would help us in apply recommendations and find better opportunities to redesign the Expresso system based on User Centered needs and frustrations.

Define

After discovering and research phase, I need to understand the current flows of the system to have a better understanding of these findings. I mapped some of the main flows to understand the pain points and where were critical moments and major problems to the customers that the system was triggering.

Main Findings

With these analysis I was able to match the information between customer complaints and usability issues to define the next problems:

• Users needs guidance of the steps they need to take in order to complete their booth, based on their most demanded needs.

• Users needs a clear workflow so they can understand where to start and how many steps they need to take to finish.

• Users need visibility on what they have already add in order and to be aware of totals.