In early 2013, Walmart launched the Scan & Go feature set for their mobile app. Scan & Go allows customers, using their smartphones, to scan items as they are taken off the shelf and checkout using the app at a self-service station. Besides the boost to operational efficiency for individual stores, this new feature added transparency to price rollbacks while shopping and a speedy checkout for customers.
While their mobile app had over 10,000,000 downloads in the iOS app store alone, the new feature set suffered from low adoption rates that stemmed from usability issues and a general lack of awareness. We also found engineering and operational inefficiencies that emerged from the disparate experiences between Android and iOS devices.
Walmart hired Catalina Marketing to help address the low adoption problem; Catalina turned to us for help redesigning the experience.
We collaborated with Catalina’s Mobile Product and User Experience teams to research the causes of low awareness and user retention. We used our findings to design a more intuitive navigation system, simplify the checkout workflow, address inconsistencies with their scanning functionality, and redesign the Walmart app’s home screen to improve awareness of Scan & Go. User testing was used to inform refinements of the design and prototype. We also redesigned the experience for both Android & iOS devices - not only to unify the experience, but to ease maintenance overhead for the product managers who would own this feature after handoff.
We worked closely with Walmart and customer champions throughout the entire research project:
Customer and market research (JTBD) - We conducted thorough customer research through surveys, live observing, 1 on 1 interviews, and ethnography for similar product experiences. In addition, we identified key personas to help us further validate the initial problem statement.
Low fidelity prototyping and early testing - Rapid prototyping allowed us to do unmoderated user testing to validate early ideas and potential solutions. We also used usertesting.com to run some early scripted tests to identify any potential pain points user might run into throughout the experience.
UI/UX Design - Once our ideas were validated and iterated on, we were ready to start on high fidelity designs. We did further testing with InVision prototypes once we had a working prototype in place.
Implementation & QA - Working very closely with engineering, we decomposed all of the designs into digestible releases for development. After identifying releases, we wrote all stories and acceptance criteria in Jira.
Our success led to another engagement, helping the Catalina Mobile Product team design a white label mobile checkout product, with the ability to aggregate data from over 22,000 stores nationwide. But that’s a story for another day…