All that Glitters
Malabar Gold and Diamond (MGD) is a Jeweller group established in 1993, with 330 stores in 11 countries. Each store has one or more store heads, and a group of such stores has a regional head.
Our Objective was to Enable the business teams to seamlessly manage discount requests of high value flowing from among the salesman, store head and regional head.
MY ROLE
Responsible for research, conceptualisation, design, Hi-Fi Interactive Prototype.
TEAM
1 Designer, 1 Project Manager & 3 Developers.
TIMELINE
December, 2023
Can we do it for lesser?
Current Process
When a Customer looking to purchase at the Malabar store negotiates a discount that is above the Salesman's disposal threshold, the Store manager steps in and decides to approve or reject the customer's request. If there is a high-value, loyal customer who expects a little more discount? (Trust me, they do). The Store manager has to ring in the Regional head and get his approval for processing this discount request.
We equipped Malabar's regional and store managers to make informed decisions in approving or rejecting discount requests and keep track of them hassle-free and seamlessly on their self-service mobile app.
Umm but Sir, What do you do?
(Remote, In-depth Interviews & a focus group session with Regional and Store Heads.)
"It gets really busy some days"
"As a store head, I need to handle the client, balance business interest too, quite a day"
"Communication between us regional and store heads has not always been smooth, then it might cause delay and customer might not have good experience at our store."
"oh, and the festive season"
"Customers are eager once a design is selected, they wnat to hear a Yes to their negotiation.
Who could they be?
Personas sketched out of the conversations with the user groups
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How might we?
Once we established a holistic User journey, we broke them down into individual problem statements and figured out how might we address them
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Testing the Hypothesis
We conducted another couple of interactions with the management! tech heads! and project delivery team and came up with the hero elements that made it to the design stage.
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Lo-fi sketches did not work for this project and multiple interactive prototypes were built using the existing design system of the client’s mobile app!
We tested frequently with two groups of users consisting of salespersons! store heads and a very few regional heads.
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AVERAGE TASK COMPLETION TIME
(find a pending request, approve/reject it by thinking out loud)
Error rate
Task completion rate
3 minutes
4%
92%
Assumption Invalidated
A learning that felt humbling reiterated the fact that user needs are more often than not different from our assumptions.
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With more than 12 fields to each card, we faced a challenge in utilizing the real estate yet, Abbreviations like ‘Req dmd cts’, Req%, and Cart itms dmd cts were expanded to their complete forms like Requested diamond carats.
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Usability tests showed us that the users preferred the shorter forms and were delayed in recognizing these terms. What felt like an effort to provide clarity to the user by writing the full text was met by the mental model of the users who were accustomed to reading them a certain way.
HMW - Arm the user for they may approve/reject as they should.
Approvers at regional level! might have a line up of requests waiting for them! All of them being important and urgent
Notifications carry an indicator, the pending label also indicates the number of requests pending action.
HMW - Arm the user for they may approve/reject as they should.
A lot of information is considered before acting on a request, more often than not a user needs to look at all of this, at the same time
Visual hierarchy using font weights and tags to highlight fields at a glance. Clear status indication of the request’s stages completed and current status
Cards to make it easier for users to distinguish different pieces of information presented in bite-sized chunks, perfectly effective for mobile interface.
