Endless Aisle

"Endless Aisle" is the big project I spent the most time in between 2016 up until summer 2018. Here problem from the business side was that we do not have physical space in the stores to show our entire range, especially not in the smaller city stores, because of their locations and sizes do not have white goods in the store and can not accommodate a large stock.

When this landed on my table, I began to look at how we could test if this would be used at all. Basically, the belief is that there are something the customers and employees want, primarily mtp those products that can not be displayed physically in the store, but for all other products that occasionally can be difficult for a customer to find in the shelves.

To find out if something was going to be used, it took some time to get an MVP using existing web pages and customizing CSS as well as a little in order not to let customers access the entire internet. This was put up in a store and I followed up on the use. At the same time, I spent some time talking to the merchants in the store to discuss some ideas beyond the "only minimum" that was tested just then. There came some great input on how they intended to use these installations, mtp the location relative to the sales terminals.

Already when I was running with the initial validation, it was clear to me that here, using a digital installation, could much more than just show our products. An example is to use any of these terminals to let customers begin to fill in service / return while waiting for their turn that way is not as time consuming as long. This is something I have not yet had the opportunity to test out as there has been no need for things to do with this project but it comes.

When we saw that the use was about not that high just then, this first version was out of performance and some other things since it was a quick and dirty way to get it tested.

At this point, nobody really took ownership of this, so I took over the role of the product owner and have driven it on.

Based on insight as far as it is used, the next step was to build a new prototype with a focus on better performance in order to test whether we can increase usage and if we can get the sellers to use these instead of their PC / sales terminals.

What's a bit polite about what happened in the past 3 months is that in contrast to my initial idea that if we get the sellers to use it, customers will use it seems to have gone the other way, namely that Customers' use has now allowed sellers to use it with customers, however, it is the primary customers who use it, "old habits die hard" is called.

The next thing I've been trying to get tested is whether we will offer "check out" via these terminals. This can be especially useful for days with a lot of customers in stores such as Black Friday, as many have to queue to tell the sellers that they Must have that offer or offer. Other scenarios are simple things like getting along with sellers or solely ordered goods that are not in store for the store or directly home via a low friction payment solution ala ViPPS.