M1 Store
2020
User Research / Stakeholder Interview & Workshop / Spatial Design / Innovative Solutions
In Essense:
Singapore’s telecom brand wanted to modernise their stores and offerings to create a fresh image to current and potential customers.
Learning more about the space
Before the project kicked off, we decided to be snacking outside the store while observing the people and how they are interacting with the space. Typical interactions were observed; people trying out phones, staff helping out customers with their needs, and a surprising number of elderly just enjoying the seats available.
An interesting observation that was validated after we started our interviews with those customers was that those elderly weren’t customers and they wanted to rest on the empty seats.
Gathering the needs of the business and the staff
Stakeholder interviews were done with their leadership to get a bettering understanding of the current state and where they want to go. But they are not the only ones who needed help, so we decided to talk to the store staff to get insights that would help drive grounded ideas.
There were a lot of information to sift through, but by employing affinity mapping to help identify and group problems that align.
Aligning on ideas and priorities
Good ideas don’t just come from a single person; it’s best with a collective group to help ideate with different perspectives. With that in mind, a workshop with decision-making clients was conducted to help drum up interesting ideas. Yes, sometimes these ideas might either be too unrealistic or don’t quite solve the problem. So that’s where we come in to reframe and come up with our own ideas with all the needs we gathered before, and also to help develop a matrix to prioritise those with the highest impact to the easiest to execute.
What came to life
Physical Store
Physical Store
A store flow was planned out from a customer’s perspective, like a user journey but for a physical space. This helps ensure we cover the needs of customers, while allowing staff to efficiently use their time to help those who require it. This flow is then juxtaposed with the physical store floor plan. At this stage, measurements and balance between the front and back of house are essential to ensure that our thinking is correctly reflected for contractors to do their job.
Render of space with section planning
Customer Journey for existing customer
Physical flow walkthrough
Virtual Ambassadors
Virtual Ambassadors
One of the innovative ideas was to create a virtual assistant to help reduce the load on staff by allowing customers that only need to do product exploration and simple enquiries. Being the time before IA became so prominent in our lives, we had to come up with a chat flow and ensure that customers are able to get to the information they need. This is paired with a virtual character that moves and converses, creating a close to realistic staff interaction experience. The character movement was recorded with a scripted designed to help people get to the information or action.
