Loss Prevention Tools Web App

Overview

About

Loss prevention professionals who work specifically in small to medium size retail companies are finding it hard to effectively upload & analyze data for specific internal theft categories with a tool that is price-effective & tailored to their specific needs.

For this concept piece, I worked on a team of three and served as the Information Architect, Visual Designer, and Project Manager.

Duration

This project was completed over a 2.5 week design sprint.

Process

• Project Management
• Business Analysis (develop understanding of client through kick off meeting and in depth interview)
• User Research (Interviews, Proto persona, & Task Scenario Development
• Information Architecture
• Interaction Design & User Testing
• Visual Design
• Final Prototype

Final Design

The Challenge

Loss Prevention Tools is working to build a digital tool geared toward retail loss prevention to assist loss prevention experts with analyzing data and case management.

The goals of the web app design:

• Create a more intuitive data analysis web app for analyzing internal theft within retailers.
• Validate ideas and user base.
• Offer a less complicated and less expensive tool that is more straightforward and doesn’t require intensive training.
• Offers key components of other loss prevention tools.

The Solution

We will create a platform that loss prevention experts can utilize to upload data, filter the proper categories, analyze the results, and conduct investigations in a time-efficient manner.

Discovery

Project Management

To manage the team in terms of task assignments and project plan creations, I made a spreadsheet as suggested by fellow team members. It guided me in conducting daily check-ins to make sure every task decision related to the project was on track. A team meeting was also conducted prior to releasing everyone to do their assigned tasks. The purpose of this was to review the list of tasks, deadlines, client, and team goals.Lastly, doing all of these provided that big picture road map for where I am taking the team and how we are going to get the end goal.

Client Interview

The team and I compiled a list of questions about the company, business goals, and asked the client during kick off meeting. The responses gave us great insight about the client and his specific goals for this project.

Research Problem Statement

"I will identify how loss prevention experts currently analyze retailer data to pinpoint internal theft by conducting telephone and in-person interviews & compiling the results."

Lauren came up with the Research Problem Statement before the team collectively decided on a Problem Statement because of the fact that the company does not currently have a product. The research would be significant in informing us the right target users and designing the MVP.

Competitive Analysis

Lauren, being the lead researcher did a competitive research to gain more insights about loss prevention tools that the industry professionals use. Results showed that most tools in the market are expensive and offer features that are more advanced.

What do users think about their current loss prevention digital tool? What would make their job easier?

The first 5 days of the project was spent with research.Even though Lauren was the head researcher, it made sense to help her in looking for the right target audience and conduct interviews. First, I went out with the team for initial interview with store managers around nearby businesses during daytime. Secondly, I went to 4 stores still in downtown (All Saints Clothing, Carhartt, Ross, Barnes and Noble) asking the Loss Prevention managers with 17 formal questions and recruited them for testing later. So far, I managed to interview 2 successfully. None said yes for the testing.

Main themes from the initial interviews as summarized by Lauren:

• Problem: Manually sifting through the data to find the outliers, which takes 8-20 hours.
• The way that managers and directors go about their investigations really depends on what type of theft occurs (examples include: refunds, returns, before/after hours transactions, voids, discounts, paperwork errors, training errors).
• Frequency of data varies from store to store, ranging from daily to weekly.
• Data uploading varies, ranging from copying and pasting, IT uploading, and a real-time updated P.O.S.

Surprising Findings & Insights:

• 4/4 users were unhappy with their current platform.
• Not one platform used or one consistent standardized procedure.

Approach

Who is our Primary User? Secondary User?

Lauren developed 2 proto personas based on the initial user research. Richard, being the Director of Loss Prevention, was our primary user and Danielle, the Loss Prevention Associate, was the secondary target user.

Loss Prevention Tools should provide the following to greatly accommodate our proto personas:

• Produce organized reports.
• An inexpensive tool.
• A streamlined process for uploading data and identifying outliers.
• A clean dashboard to conduct organized in-depth investigations.

The persona and scenario development helped to keep us on track as a team and prioritize the features to be added to the web app. It also helped us in creating a particular flow a user might possibly take.

As the visual designer, I sketched a storyboard to illustrate Richard’s challenges in using the current loss prevention tool his company provided.

This is based on a story of a Loss Prevention Director who happens to be Richard; he wants to investigate an employee and uses the POS data that is fed into the security system to determine if that employee is committing fraud/theft. So you can see Richard is extremely overwhelmed with the amount of data he is looking at. He does not want to manually sift through the data. He needs help.He is so frustrated & he throws his hand up in the air.

Information Architecture

My teammates and I agreed to consider the layout of the web app simple. With that and the research findings in mind, I being the information architect made this sitemap. I wanted to create a simple and logical site structure that can help users achieve their end goal, and to allow them to easily understand how to navigate, giving them a positive experience. I started with some sketches on paper before I came up with the final one.

After some analysis and careful thought, I went on to develop a user need’s focused flow which can help Richard and Danielle to complete their task, achieve their goals and feel better about it. Tasks include uploading a file, filtering data, running report, viewing analyzed report, saving it, sharing the data and exporting it. I started the initial user flows in paper and finalized it via OmniGraffle.

Design

Feature Prioritization & Recommendations for the Web App after Initial Research

• Simple and clear dashboard that makes it easy for users to upload data and filter for results they are looking for.
• Option to filter top results, date range, print/PDF/email report.
• Ability to pull out certain results and organize them in ‘To Investigate’ and ‘Investigated’ folders within the dashboard.

Sketching

Dom as the Interaction Designer led the creation of some rough sketches for possible featured screens. I also provided my input as we did rounds of whiteboarding.

Design Studio

A major decision my group mates and I thought of was to conduct a design studio led by Dom. The purpose of this was to understand the client's views and to clearly define the key screens the web app needed. It was a vital brainstorming, and learning experience for myself and the team as this helped in knowing what major components needed to be displayed for the web app design.

Wireframes & User Testing

As the interaction designer, Dom made the initial wireframes. As soon as he was done, he handed it over to Lauren for initial user testing. We had a total of 4 user tests. It was challenging to find the target users. It was more hard to convince any available Loss Prevention Specialist to test the screens. But luck was on our side and was able to get someone to try it. Lauren led the user testing by sending the link to a user and then asking the user to go through it while talking out loud over the phone for any concerns, ideas and more. I recorded the conversation using my phone while Lauren and Dom took notes on the other hand. We did this process 3 times. We were also able to conduct 1 in-person user testing. I was very fortunate to find this person at the right place and at the right time. After Lauren relayed the documentation results from the user testing, Dom incorporated the changes and started designing high fidelity wires.

Takeaways from the User Testing:

• Adding a timestamp for line items to make it easier to find an event on the camera systems.
• Incorporating a dropdown for individual line items, which allows users to pinpoint when exactly something happened.
• Including a section in each report to write notes from the interview investigation, in addition to the Executive Summary section.
• Adding the option to upload multiple spreadsheets, then have options to combine the data or build out separate graphs.

Visual Design & Mock Up

As the Visual Designer of the group without any good background of visual design, I had to challenge myself by doing the “Branding Challenge" I found online. This helped me in incorporating the right colors, typography and more into the wireferames. Here is my report:

Final Mock Up

Prototype

Recommended Next Steps For The Client

• Test prototype with more loss prevention experts.
• Continue validating the idea.
• Develop MVP to acquire sign-ups from potential customers.

Reflections

• For future steps, I would like to spend time finessing the visual design. I admit that this was quite a handful of a role but Dom and Lauren made it easy for me to fulfill it.
• I initially wanted to take on the Interaction Design role because I think that this discipline of UX Design is somewhat my weakest. In order for me to improve on this, I should be practicing designing / adding more screens for some areas of the web app that were left uncovered.
• Managing this kind of “project” was new to me. Lauren and Dom had the role from the previous project. Once again, they were kind enough to help me do my job smoothly. Because of that, I’d like to research more on different ways to manage projects in any field productively.
• I also got good feedback from teammates, classmates and instructors on my presentation / introduction skills mixed with an unusual humor which made our supposedly boring topic interesting. This motivates me more to keep on bettering myself in whatever goal I want to achieve.
• Lastly, the key finding was that our users / Loss Prevention Experts (and with consideration to our proto personas) need to have a better loss prevention tool user experience in terms of data / report analysis and managing cases. We attempted to solve that by designing the web app with the success metrics in mind- Quick Learning Curve; Easy to use for Loss Prevention Investigators; Validate Idea and Identify user base. More testing is needed to find out if this is truly an effective solution for users.