Distiman App — Case Study

Role

UX Research, IA & Wireframing, and prototyping.

The Why.

The existing app was being used by a small number of retailers which helped in revenue and growth. However, to scale to a larger user base the platform had become fragile and was no longer sustaining the requirements of our users or the needs of the business. The plan was simple, re-platform to a mobile-first app, implement components using material design and align the app with the new brand expression.

Digging into the problem at hand

To kick things off the team decided to visit Mysore to understand the type of users in Distiman. We needed to confirm certain questions that were being raised by the stakeholders:

• Does Distiman provide any value to the retailers?
• Is Distiman needed or any pre-positioned app will work for retailers?

Our goal was to get answers to these questions raised. We met with around 15–20 retailers with a clear mindset to observe, listen, and sponge-up as much as we can of their daily app usage. We decided to carry no biased prejudice nor suggestions or solutions to what they might want. We took the approach of having multiple people from our team listen to the same conversation and have varied interpretations.

Observations

• In the current app to do a simple task like search needed the user to go inside a Brand SKU listing and search, which will do a global search of all available products. As disturbing as it sounds most users never knew there was a search feature until we pointed it out.
• Most orders placed currently were done with the assistance of the distributor salesman. The retailers weren’t using the app to place orders.
• Retailers look forward to branding promotions and offers. This plays a major in selling products to end customers and unfortunately, the app failed to deliver visibility on the go. Users had to go into the menu, tap on “Promotions” to view the offers and discounts. Here they get a listing of the products but cannot place an order.
• At most of the outlets, the same order was being placed post 2–3 days of delivery. Users had to do the entire flow of going into the app, scan for products under each brand and place the order.
• Some users had issues with the app not being multilingual. Our users were from Kholapur and Mysuru with their mother tongue being Kannada and Marathi.

Few moments captured from our visits in Mysore

Identifying and Prioritising Pain Points

We reviewed the observations and jotted down each user’s pain point onto a Post-It notes. Then used affinity mapping to group the pain points into similar categories on a whiteboard. Once we had an idea on how Distiman could branch out as a platform for retailers we set out to create wireframes.

Personas

With close interactions among different users, we proceeded in structuring user personas and divided our users into three profiles:

• Power Users

• Standard Users

• New Users

Solution

We decided to tackle the pain points that were both important to users and Distiman. Taking some key observations into consideration and the wireframes we went ahead and created a high fidelity design which would help us in confirming our research.

Instance #1

We reduced the number of menu items to 4 i.e, Home, My Orders, Smart Buy and Payment. Ideally retailers scan though the brands and view products in it to place an order. Navigating to other tabs in the older version needed multiple clicks to reach the pages. With the new bottom navigation we are allowing users to see top-level and frequently-used actions at the bottom of the screen.

Instance #2

Introduction of smart buy was something we as a team wanted to try out. The idea behind this was to simplify users ordering process. In 3 steps the users could place an order and our customer reps would call them to verify the order. We received positive feedback while testing it out with our users.

Instance #3

Users now could Reorder their previous place orders. These orders were the ones that were only successfully delivered. When we checked our data base we saw a-lot of recurring orders with the same SKUs in it. So instead of them doing the same process again and again, we simplified the ordering process with one tap on the previous order.

With the promise of delivering product within 24 hours of order placing, we provided easy tracking options for our users. They could track them and raise concerns if order wasn't delivered within the mentioned time frame.

Some other tweaks were made to the application, but many of the opportunities and tweaks we made might not have been thought off when designing from our desks. Interacting with the users helped in simplifying the revamp process. Here’s a prototype of the updated app in action:

Impact

The updated version of the app was launched after almost 4 months of iterations and testing. From a business point of view and product point of view we adhered to few changes. In terms of the positives we saw since the launch were:

• Active user count was again on a rise. From merely 200 outlets we were now serving 600+ outlets.
• The # of unique active users in Distiman increased.
• The app was now just not serving the retailers, we were able to use the components in app and white-label to few enterprise clients.