MACY’S - ProHOW app

THE PROBLEM
Macys had a particular situation among their work force, their STYLISTS were not communicating nor sharing their sales knowledge among their peers, also the Jr stylists were not knowledgeable enough about the complete product catalog and this triggered missed opportunities of sales to their clients.

RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
Throughout the research we discovered Macy's recognition program was not up to date and the disconnection between managers and employees was very evident. 

The lack of communication from experience stylist to the Jr stylist became an issue as well as their internal communication tool, YAMMER, which was an obsolete tool for the stylist.

Because most of the stylist use their personal Instagram as a way to reach their customers, Macy's needed to create a way for the stylist to share their knowledge internally so it can be transferred to other less experienced workers.

MY ROLE
As a Lead Product Designer, I was assigned to conduct research, create user paths, mockups/demos, wire-framing, final UI design, deployment advice, daily stand up with the programming team overseas, and overall product expectation management.

After the research took place, I started to work on ideas based on what I learned. The goal was to create a low-fi demo and align the needs of the app. The app was supposed to be loaded on the company’s tablets and some people (mostly managers) would have access to the app on their own devices.

WORKING DIRECTION
I developed a small demo for a secondary research engagement. This time the target audience only involved stylists that made one million-dollar sales or more per year. This was a racially diverse group of stylists, approximately 60% women and 40% men and their ages ranged from 24 to 55 years old. We focused on this group because their reputation was well known among the Macy’s employees.

One of the stylists, his name was Mark, was quite concerned about the integration points of the app. He, as well as the rest of the stylist, wished to know if they would be able to access their postings from INSTAGRAM. 

We knew this it would be an important aspect of the adoption for this app among the work force, that is why my team implemented an API that allowed us to load personal postings from Instagram into our environment. We also integrated analytics into the mix, because we wished to find the correlation between posts frequency, tags and sales.

During the BETA testing of the app, we requested the same research group to help on testing. At that point the user was able to access their INSTAGRAM accounts. Users like Mark were really happy to know that their posting will be accessible to share with their peers.

I created all the user and interaction maps for the app, but as time is short, today I added a link on the presentation in case you wish to go over the paths later. The MVP took about 8 months and then some 5 additional months to finally deploy the app on phase one.  

THE RESULT
This app would allow the user to check their local or national company news, post images or videos, tag the items, load personal post from Instagram, filter content, and even tag inappropriate post if necessary.

To increase use and acceptance among the users, I proposed a gamification strategy, meaning the user will get a series of badges and points for every post they create, increasing the traffic and knowledge transfer, at the end the user would be gratified for their actions. Recognition of effort was a key for adoption.

Other features this app had for a second and third deployment was peer-to-peer communication. These screens are an example of how the peer-to-peer section would look.

Another feature was an internal revenue via SPECIAL POSTS.  Macy’s would be making money from the app by selling access to their vendors. Meaning that if a new item is available, the vendor will post it, the user can see it and request their store to sell it, then recommend it to their personal customers.  This completes the loop in integration inside their own employee experience.

See the DEMO here »

After much discussion, the client accepted that their current Windows tablets were not optimal for the stylist, and little by little the deployment happened on the employee’s own iOS devices, and eventually on Android as well.

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