Asurion 2018 Hackathon

Improving the customer in-store cell phone shopping experience with AR

Overview

In this 24-hour Hackathon, I worked as the lead UX designer with a group of PM, app developers, front-end and back-end engineers to come up with a solution on improving the customer in-store cell phone shopping experience with AR tech. Working with the team for the first time, we were able to tackle a current painpoint, present and demo our solution, and won the 1st prize of the regional innovative idea category!

Process

The group of us get together because we were interested in trying a new type of user engagement that we don’t get to do in our daily jobs. We soon decided we’d want to explore with AR UX. Before diving into the technology too much, I suggested our team took a step back to think about what is the problem/opportunity we were trying to target.

Understand- 2 hours field study trip to a local store

Few of us had visited a nearby store for a quick field study. We talked with the store tech assistant and a customer to understand the current experience, and soon identified a problem space for our project. This field study was critical to our project, that not only provides us with an understanding of the current customer experience, but also gave us confidence and excitement on this opportunity we can bring to meet the real customer’s need.

Assumptions

With the limited time, we made few assumptions after doing our feasibility check:

• We assumed the customer had the AR kit set up on their devices before walk into this experience.

• We assumed the customer is currently using one of our carrier’s plan. Their registered account is correct and up to date, so we can associate their account with the registered plan to ease out the onboarding steps and to provide the right suggestion that fits their need.

• After mapping out the interaction flow. (as shown below) We also assumed the product comparison feature is outside of our Hackathon scope.

Mapping out the interaction flow

Solution

Onboarding

• The onboarding flow follows the same protocols as the in-store tech assistant’s first few questions to a customer at the beginning of their conversation.

• We focused on providing a simple and straightforward interaction with a playful and almost gamified approach for better engagement.

• We suggested easy-to-navigate interactions by providing 2 options: voice control and fat-finger navigation, with consideration of the accessibility needs on mobile devices in the store environment.

Guided shopping experience

In consideration of the customer’s environment, we decided to provide a guided experience to help them on how to interact with the products with their portable devices.

The one-stop shop concept

• Based on the device a customer is interested, we suggest the data plan and insurance bundle based on their earlier answers from the onboarding flow. The customer can purchase at this point or continue to walk around to investigate other devices.

• This step was the main painpoint in the in-store service.

Check out and device pickup

• Customer can check out on their device with their prefered payment method.

• We included a store map on the receipt confirmation page to help customer quickly locate where to pick up their device, since the pickup counter isn’t always right next to where they stand in the device display area.

Result and reflection

We presented our solution with live AR experience demo, and won the 1st prize of the regional innovative idea category!

During this hackathon, we were mainly focusing on the end-to-end happy path experience. While realizing there are many scenarios and interaction flows and details need to be considered as the next step. It would be nice if we can run a usability test in the store environment, to observe how would customer using it, identify challenges and learn their feedback to validate our solution.