I HAVE SPACE
In most of the world, deliveries need to be attended. The complaints that we often hear is:
" If I'm not home to receive my packages today, why would you assume that I'm going to be able to receive it tomorrow at this time? I'll still be at work."
My role was to create a new touch point to allow customers to pickup their packages without delays. The business model for Amazon is to partner up with chain stores to help solve its delivery experience where customers were unable to receive their packages because they were not home to receive them.
The solution I created is a mobile app that will allow associates to easily move around their stores to find, pick and hand over packages to customers. The storefront gives associates a quick glance at Amazon related tasks in their store and an entry point to completing these tasks. Thus far we have expanded to over 180 stores in Giunti and over a dozen stores in Oxxo.
The two key use cases that these store deal with most are the carrier dropoff to receive all the packages into the store and customer pickup for when customers arrive to get their packages.
Design with assumptions and constraints.
As a brand new product at Amazon, I had the opportunity to craft the experience and help drive the future of the program. The project started by simply recreating the pickup and dropoff process with other co-workers and testing paper prototypes to find pain points. We quickly moved from a screen with a series of entry points to a scan and search only.
The mass button entry points was the first iteration and it created a very confusing experience where they were mislead down the wrong flow with no warning.
Taking learnings from that we quickly moved to an automated process, where a customer or delivery associate needed to bring a code in. Once that code is scanned or entered the system will determine, who and why this person is here.
Crafting the experience from scratch.
Using these key scenarios, I quickly iterated by having co-workers play out the roles of store associate, customer and carrier.
Creating user flows.
Using research and customer feedback to iterate.
We travelled to Mexico and received invaluable feedback from our direct customers. It helped us realize that even though we are working on a global experience, sometimes the designs need to be localized to cater to the culture, education level and many other limiting factors. Since launch we have been iterating relentlessly to improve store associate's experience.
OLD
NEW
Here is one example during Alpha testing.
Based on our research, we decided to change our content to cater more specifically to how store associates understood these processes.
In Mexico we had: CHECK PACKAGE IN & CHECK PACKAGE OUT
In Italy we had: PACKAGE DROPOFF & PACKAGE PICKUP
Continue iterating.
Soon after the launch in Mexico, we were ramping up and adding new features to support use cases for the Italy pickup point model. The partnership with Giunti required our team to build a dashboard. The dashboard would allow the stores to have an overview of packages inbound, outbound and completed. To access this dashboard, the user would need to go to the hamburger menu.
Sometimes reality is very different than assumptions. When I started designing the dashboard, one of the fundamental assumption that I made was that users would want to rely on the storefront and only access this dashboard at the beginning of the day or end of day. The reality was that users spent most of their day on dashboard and only when a customer was in front of them would they go to storefront.
Research & findings in Italy.
I travelled to Italy for a week to observe and conduct research on how store associate were using our App. The diagram below shows their daily operations and areas that could be improved.
The findings led to numerous updates and explorations. The next major steps is providing and integrated dashboard/storefront front page. In a few short weeks, I have a concept that thus far works based off of my gorilla research. Below are a few pages from the research.
