A day in the life of …
How to maintain the link between the operational teams and the team behind their daily tools.
User experience has always been at the heart of our Colibri mobile team DNA. Every day our job is to create and maintain mobile tools for our colleagues in the Leroy Merlin stores.
As our practice is scaling and the team growing with some former co-workers leaving. It was necessary to do something to keep the mindset alive and to strengthen our links with end-users.
The starting point
Our mobile leaders soon came up with this idea of sending the entire building team; PO’s; UX’ers, Devs, two days in stores with users, including themselves.
So we started creating & planning the event, asking for voluntary stores across France, ready to welcome us in their daily lives. Beaubourg (Paris), Gradignan Bordeaux), Reims la Neuvilette, Nantes and Nice gave a positive response.
We created Five teams of around five people from our three squads and with different positions.
The main objective was clear, getting a better understanding of the field context. Witnessing the impacts of mobile app incidents and allowing us to respond to store problematics with more accuracy in the future. But we also wanted to keep an open mind to collect data beyond what happens only with mobile usage to feed other teams with related insights. Meeting almost all the positions in stores, sharing their points of view is necessary to get a global understanding of the ecosystem a store is.
The event
These were two intensive days for the team, gathering feedbacks, discovering business actions, finding problematics & living in-store context. We met devoted people who took the time to show us many aspects of their daily life.
It’s also fascinating to think we witnessed just a glimpse of this all ecosystem a Leroy Merlin store is.
By the end of each day, each team took the time to share what they learned, heard & observed. Translating this data on post-its was our first step before clustering them by representative topics.
It gave us a good scouring visualization too.
Back to the office
When we got back from the event, we did the same job but cross teams.
Given the amount of data collected, it took us a long time to clear the land. And that was just the beginning.
How to translate this amount of data?
To better communicate what we found with the stores, we sort out the feedbacks in 5 main categories with each their subcategories :
- Bugs ( in different resolution status)
- Known subject and already in progress
- Already existing but not known from users
- We’ll dig into it and prioritize.
It helped us communicate with the stores on the hundred of thematics that came out of this event they hosted!
Value Creation
What value did we create spending two days in stores?
Communication! We can expect people in stores to discover features they didn’t know already exist, to solve their problems.
Transparency! They now know the status of their problems regarding mobility usage. Bugs will be defeated.💪🏻
An open door! We now have the responsibility to give them feedback on the resolution of the new bugs we found.
Hope! By transmitting the bugs or problematics related to other teams. They can expect a step forward in these subjects.
Bonding! We also sent a survey when we get back to the office to get feedback on how they lived this event from their point of view. The response was globally positive.
Here are some quotes from the stores :
“I really enjoyed the different exchanges and I think it’s essential that they spend time in the store to help us better behind.”
“It’s rewarding to know and talk to each other”
“We were able to really discuss the different problems we encounter with the use of our mobile apps with their makers, so it was interesting and pretty nice.”
“A good experience. We were able to testify to our feelings that we are living on mobile use every day, whatever it is positive or negative”
86% of the respondents say they’ll love to have this event again in their store!
This is pretty encouraging for a future edition even if we had a lot of feedback from our team and the store’s team on how to improve this kind of event.
From all this, we believe this event created value for both sides and it reinforces our vision of a UX first approach.
We can’t wait to keep improving our practice and the store’s mobility to make their mobile usage as easy in business as it is in their personal life.
