Pick & Go

Sainsbury's new proposition

Role: Lead Designer

Role

I was the only dedicated designer for the majority of this project, so my role crossed many aspects. 

• Digital design work

  • From a blank page to full end-to-end mapping of the Pick & Go experience across digital and physical environments.

  • I utilised the Sainsbury's design system to create the visual designs.
    • As the scope of my role increased, I had some assitance in the latter parts of the project from a few other designers on some of the visuals and illustrations. 

• Understanding the Amazon tech

  • Joining the Sainsbury's Tech Lead on conversations with Amazon to understand their technology and how it works with ours, and the how this impacts the customer experience.

• Stakeholder influencing

  • Reacting to business direction, as well as influencing up.

• Cross team influencing

  • Liaising with and influencing marketing, formatting and operational teams who had an impact on the end-to-end customer experience.

Approach

We used a 3 amigos approach consisiting of Product, Tech and Customer Experience Design.

The role and responsibility of the 3 amigos was to set a clear product direction by taking in to account each of the 3 aspects of the 3 amigos:

• Technically what was possible. 
• Would it solve customer painpoints and provide a fluid experience.
• Meet the requirements of the business. 

The 3 amigos approach model provides autonomy and ownership for the wider project team of developers whilst encouraging clear, honest communication with calm and flexible mindsets. 

Wider team & stakeholders

Core Pick & Go digital team consisted of 7-9 individuals with specific skillsets.

But a much wider involvement with direction from above and the need to influence upwards and sideways.

Proposition

Pick & Go is a SmartShop experience (powered by Amazon's Just Walk Out technology), that allows customers to scan in to a shop, pick their items, and then walk out of the store.

No more queuing. It's as simple as that...

problem

This project was a just do it project from the Director of Retail and Digital and Head of Strategy, with no defined purpose, or problem it was solving.

Therefore the 3 amigos; Tech Lead, Product Owner and I (Design Lead) brainstormed possible reasons for this. 

This also helped us define potential hypotheses, outcomes and metrics. 

hypothesis creation 

I previously created a hypothesis framework which I introduced to this team. 

The structure of the framework ensured several key things when creating hypotheses: 

• Does the hypothesis relate to a customer problem, if so, what?
• Why it's important to Sainsbury's we understand this hypothesis?
• How are we going to measure this hypothesis?
• Is it even possible to get the data, and where from?
  
• Can we test this hypothesis fairly / accurately in how the first store will be set up?

initial sketching

I started early sketching to create a starting point and aid initial discussions within the project team (Engineers, Product Owner) of the experience we'd be creating together. 

flows & understanding the amazon tech

Based on several conversations with Amazon, and working alongside our Tech Lead, I started to put together a flow to represent how the Amazon Just Walk Out technology worked. 

A key part of this process involved questioning the Amazon tech and how it would work in specific scenarios. We were then able to go back to Amazon to understand the finer details of how their tech impacted customer experiences and speak more from a customer lens rather than purely tech.

Examples of key questions:

• Who is charged if items are passed to others. 
  
• Parent and child entry. 
• Avoiding the underage taking alcohol. 
• How payments are processed and timings. 
• Avoiding someone sneaking in to the store on someone elses account. 
  

wireframes

From a greater understanding of how the Amazon tech worked, I could then start to visualise a first draft of the real flow.  

The business had been in talks with Amazon for many months prior to the involvement of the digital team. 

As such, being able to bring to life how this checkoutless shopping experience could look for a customer was a major leap forward, driving excitement and greater engagement when discussing it within the business. 

Design

I revisited the initial flows and created numerous additional journeys that we now knew we needed to cater for. 

This involved more thorough conversation with our Tech Lead to understand what was possible. 

Detailed design

From this, I used the Sainsbury's Luna design system to start creating visuals for how the experience would work. 

I attempted to increase my skills by creating some illustrations, and worked with an illustrator to refine these. 

Credit: Adam Jowett, Valerie Paur, Sam Casey for helping with some visual design and illustrations. 

lab Research

We wanted to test the end-to-end experience with a prototype in the selected store, but because we were under NDA we were restricted from doing so. 

In absence of public customer testing, we created a fake store in a lab within Sainsbury's offices. Replicating all physical signage, fake entry/exit gates and an approach to the 'store'. 

Credit to Vicky Coughlin (Researcher) and Adam Jowett (Designer) for assisting in planning and running this research with me. 

Key areas we wanted to explore where whether participants could understand: 

• The QR code physical signage and sign up without assistance. 
• What to do with the digital QR code to enter the store. 
• The proposition without guidance, pre-warning or interaction with us. 
• How to exit the (fake) store. 

Supporting cross functional teams

The Pick & Go experience crosses both the physical and digital, the customer experience went beyond just digital design. With this in mind I liaised with other teams including; PR, Marketing, Formats and Operatations. 

The main aim was to get us all bought in to the idea that we were creating one end-to-end digital and phyiscal customer experience together and we needed to ensure this was as seamless as possible.