STARTING LINE

Understanding the Environment

Before I can properly start developing solutions for our main problem, I need to understand more about DOZR's users and DOZR history. First two weeks included meeting the team and learning the product, digging into the minds of sales and marketing team members to really internalize the relationship DOZR currently has with their suppliers!

Since this part was all remote, I was able to work from my own crib here!
‍

What I learned is that we have quite a high supplier drop off rate, where they go offline soon after we sell them the product. A quick look into the system sees a large percentage of partners last using the product over a year ago! Here's to brainstorming how we can get these past partners online again while still keeping up with the sales team in onboarding new users.

The current state of the onboarding experience includes:
‍

• A sales member drops off the tablet the partner will use to access their product in person, usually in a Walmart bag or similar
• Seems to be very little onboarding for users onto the supplier facing app
• Results in lots of calls back to our support team with questions or issues and lots of frustration for the user
  
• If the user needs extra components, there's no way for them to request it
• The entire troubleshooting experience is fairly unfriendly -- users have to call support with little way to self troubleshoot
• If something goes wrong with their product, there is currently no way for them to return it

Now that we know a bit more, time to start cracking!
‍

FIRST STEPS

User Journey Mapping

Journey mapping time! Here, I laid out the entire experience for a supplier receiving and launching their product for the first time. This is a detailed dive into the ideal emotions and reactions we want out of them at each step, broken down into very specific sections. For example, how do we want them to respond upon getting their first order through the app? How do we want them to feel? This will act as my guiding light and reference for all design decisions moving forward.

At the end of each step, I referenced back to the journey map to determine the next steps, and presented these along with reasons why addressing them would be beneficial. Going from the journey map, our first steps will be to address the first section of the onboarding -- when the user receives the product itself.

SOLUTIONS

First Impressions

First impressions are very important! We have one chance to hit it home and we want to do it right. Dropping off refurbished tablets, out of their box, in Walmart bags may not be the best way in achieving this. At first opening, we want the user to feel a sense of awe, wonder, and trust that the product would propel their business forward - and I set out to design an experience around exactly that.

There's a lot of thought exercises here and after hours of developments and reiterations, fast forward to -- voila!

The box has been updated to be more sleek looking and strives to address the issues with first impressions, clarity on setup, and return issues.

The contents of the box includes everything the user might need in order to maximize the chances of return, down to the tape strip for securing the box. A quickstart guide has been made to help with the onboarding pains. The inside of the box is padded with sleek, dark charcoal foam with the tablet nested safely inside. All this is to get partners excited and willing to work with us more.

SOLUTIONS

App Onboarding

As of starting my 4 months at DOZR, there wasn't an onboarding tutorial for the app. This forces the user to call DOZR support if they have troubles understanding app features. This is likely the main reason why so many of our partners bounce so quickly. Thus, this is one of the issues I wanted to address first.

Unfortunately, this work was done relatively early into my workterm, so I do not have access to the files anymore so I can't add any pictures of the ending flow, but I'll describe the solutions to the best of my ability below:

After much research on the pros and cons and the trends for onboarding in other apps, we've opted for a chalkmark style onboarding tutorial. The tutorial is split into sections including, navigations, orders, and features. This will allow the user to be able to navigate to any specific part of the tutorial and to skip sections if they are already familiar. This tutorial will be stored into a Help Page (that I will design and implement) for ease of access in case needed again in the future.

In the meantime, as the tutorial is being developed, we've also incorporated an interim solution for any product that is sent out before the full tutorial and help page can be finalized. A PDF guide with all the information (and more!) that would be included in a full tutorial will be installed on the homepage on every tablet, along with being able to be pulled up in-app on the help page and other locations when there's an issue via PDF reader.

ESTABLISHING CONFIDENCE

Test Orders

One important point that I tried to emphasize through all the projects is the key notion of establishing confidence within the userbase. According to the user persona I defined through my findings at the Starting Line, we know that our users will tend to be fairly cautious to accept technology into their work -- they've been burned before and they don't want it to happen again. They're taking a risk by partnering with DOZR, so we absolutely cannot disappoint!

If the partner has to constantly call DOZR to troubleshoot, there's not much confidence there in that they know they're connected at any given time, and it just makes the entire process unnecessarily longer. I planned to address this issue by designing a way for users to automatically send themselves test orders to check their connection to the DOZR servers at any given time.

This test order function will be nestled within the Help Page tab on the app that can be access at any time.

Main issues I had while designing this function was how to dissuade spam test orders. There is around a 30 second lag between the user hitting the "send a test order" button and the test order actually appearing on their device. Therefore, users may think that their test order didn't work and that they're not connected, or that their request didn't go through and accidentally send themselves way too many orders.

I mocked up ideas ranging from tooltip modals + disabled buttons and countdowns barring users from pressing the button again until the timer is up. In the end after a few revisions and design reviews, we opted for a full modal that will automatically close and redirect to the test order when it is sent.

You can see my completed designs finished with annotations for engineering below.

ESTABLISHING CONFIDENCE

Connection Status

Wanting to further establish confidence in the userbase, the next step was implementing a connection status. While the test orders served to check the connection specifically with DOZR servers and to subtly onboard the users on how to interact with orders, the connection status is a feature they'll see regularly to notify them of internet or server disruptions without them having to navigate into the help page to check.

Additional to the connection status testing, the scope eventually expanded to include a sign-in experience that interacts with the connection status. Ideas bounced back and forth for this one, and we considered different login screens that would best convey a feeling of confidence that the user is connected directly from the get-go. We settled on skeleton style loading in the end.