Value Retail App
/ ROLE
UX and UI designer
at Splash Worldwide Agency
/ THE CHALLENGE
Value Retail is the only company that specialises exclusively in the development and operation of luxury outlet destinations, The Bicester Village Shopping Collection in Europe and China.
The challenge was to build a new 'selling tool' application, carrying documents, videos and schematics for use use in sale of retail space for their global sales team (11 villages; 14 languages) for use exclusively on iPad devices. A vanilla app was required so each could be skinned according to region use.
/ DISCOVERY AND APPROACH
Following initial ideation, a workshop was held with key stakeholders including the client IT, Brand and regional Sales team. Validation and refinement of the requirements were defined in the workshop and a further workshop was held to agree on the information architecture and user needs.
/ DESIGN
The client wanted the core content heirarchy of the application to match that of the previous app but be flexible to change over time; driven by content management. Technically the application had to be fully synchronised; containing a local copy of content on the device to ensure it could be used in meetings where internet service might not be available.
Working with the technical architect and the client's Brand team, we identified the key sizes of their marketing repository. I created a holistic layout which allowed automatic resizing of elements to give the best representation on screen.
A design key was introduced to facilitate marking content based on the CMS load: 'new content' for elements not yet seen since the last sync, 'content due to expire' for materials which required new licenses and 'content type' to indicate if a file were a movie, PDf or image.
As each Village sales team had their own ways of approaching their Brand clients, we also created a customisable presentation. Users were able to put together a linear presentation from all the elements within the app and order them according to their needs.
/ TESTING AND ITERATION
MVP was released to the global sales team and the application was periodically improved as feedback was gathered and improvements made. Key improvements included increasing the use of swipe gestures through the heirarchy to reduce the amount of 'back button' actions for navigation and the latest versions also included report generation of the content being used for further sales production.
/ DELIVERY
After the success of the application over a number of years, its design was extended for iPhone and used by a wider audience for internal communications within the Value Retail network.