SPAR ICS SCO
Efficient self-checkout experience for less queues
The client initiated SPAR SCO to introduce self-checkout (SCO) systems in its stores in multiple countries in Europe. SPAR SCO aims to improve the customer experience by reducing waiting times and increasing convenience through allowing customers to perform their own checkout transactions without the need for staff assistance.
The focus of this project was to evaluate this new system, identify customer pain points, and finally compile short-term suggestions to ensure a seamless experience.
Challenge
How can we eliminate queues at SPAR's self-checkout area through increasing the efficiency of the system and user satisfaction?
Goal
Identifying customer pain points and coming out with short-term improvements to ensure a seamless self-checkout experience.
Solution
List of improvement suggestions not only for the SCO screens, but also the overall shopping experience, store design, information signs in parallel with the identified pain points throughout the project.
Background
Team composition and my role
The team was consisting of three experience designers including myself. All three of us worked on the project from start to end. As a result, we analysed insights, mapped the user journey, and ideated solutions together.
Being said that, we distributed some responsibilities in order to proceed efficiently. Accordingly, I took the lead in research planning and execution, as well as the UI design of our screen-based suggestions.
Process Summary
Since self-checkout experience needs to be considered holistically, we combined experience design and service design processes and approached this project as a holistic experience design.
Research
Self-checkout experience is a complex system concerning more than one actors, as well as different platforms. As a result, our research consisted various methods and involved multi-stage analysis and processing of findings.
Customer Journey Map
After analyzing the research insights, we merged our findings into one coherent customer journey map. As this project's goal was to evaluate the SCO system and to identify pain points along the customer journey, below map shows a worst-case scenario, including all pain points from queuing up until leaving the store.
The customer journey map includes the actions, expectations, thoughts/feelings, pain points and potential opportunities for these aspects of the experience.
Ideation
As a team, we engaged in the ideation phase, aiming to develop effective solutions for the identified pain points.
Feasibility Criteria: We collectively focused on short-term solutions that could be implemented with ease, considering their feasibility within the given constraints.
Clustering Opportunities: Working together, we grouped the identified opportunities into categories such as UI and store layout. This approach allowed us to streamline the mockup creation process by targeting specific areas.
Outcome
Collaboratively, we generated user stories to describe potential solutions in detail, ensuring a clear understanding of user needs and expectations. Building upon the user stories, we then proceeded to create appropriate mockups that ranged from UI designs to store layout blueprints. By visualizing our solutions, we aimed to provide tangible representations of the improvements we envisioned.
Below a selection from the suggestion designs can be found:
#1 Organizing the queues
#2 Clear lighting system
#3 Preventing errors from the beginning
#4 Improving the flow of adding no-barcode items
Reflection
Being a complex interactive system project involving interface, machine, and environment, this project provided me a valuable experience on designing a holistic user experience. Even though the project brief was focusing on SCO machine screen UI, it didn't take us long to notice the complexity and communicate it with the client in terms of defining the scope. If we had only focused on screen UI and interactions, the evaluation and suggestions would not have been realistic.
Finally, throughout the process we always needed to evaluate feasibility and to focus only fast and short-term suggestions due to the project restrictions. This challenged and allowed us to come up with practical but effective solutions to identified pain-points.
tl:dr
SPAR ICS, the IT arm of the SPAR Österreich-Gruppe, was tackling extended queues and customer frustration linked to the current self-checkout systems (SCOs).
With this project, our goal was to identify and address SCO related problems, and to come up with short-term solutions for a smoother customer experience and less queues.
Carrying out a mixture of service and UX design processes, we produced store mock-ups for store layout suggestions, screen designs for SCO machines, as well as mixed system solutions.
