Week 57 — Designing For Our Core Target Audience

Product

When we first launched DayOne, we worked hard to introduce our app to as many businesses in Singapore as possible. We strongly believed that our app had the potential to improve the operations of all brick and mortar businesses, be it a local retail store with just a few employees or a multi-outlet group.

One year down the road, we’ve come to realise that while we had initially set out to serve all businesses, the biggest use case and demand for our app ultimately lie with the larger brands.

To recap, some of the common pain points that multi-outlet businesses face include but are not limited to:

1. Juggling way too many WhatsApp groups, resulting in poor communication and information being lost in the noise
2. Inconsistent service and product offerings across outlets due to lack of standardised operating procedures
3. High staff turnover, leading to increased effort put into training for new employees to get up to speed

One of the unfortunate pain points of working in retail and F&B is the high staff turnover. While this may very well be an unsolvable problem, DayOne targets and mitigates the negative impact that it causes on business operations.

While smaller enterprises do encounter similar issues, bigger brands experience them on a much larger scale such that it affects the overall performance of the business. Hence, they gravitate towards digital solutions such as DayOne that aim to alleviate these perennial, long-term problems faced.

Different operating models give rise to different sets of problems. While DayOne has actively reached out to businesses of all sizes, we found out that businesses that found us most useful were the larger, multi-outlet ones.

Moving forward, in order to better serve our newly identified target audience, the design of our app would be geared towards the needs of larger businesses. One such example is the newly redesigned repository feature which saw new functions such as folders, multi-file uploads, and assignment of permissions to groups. These new functions would allow businesses to organise large amounts of files such that they are more searchable and accessible.

Keep a lookout for the new repository functions! They’ll be launching very soon!

In the next few weeks, we will be reviewing the other features in our app to ensure that its functions align with the specific needs of larger businesses. First up is knowledge! After speaking to users, we learned that they needed a better way of grouping the FAQs. While tags provided some form of categorisation, users mentioned that it would be helpful if the categories were apparent at a glance on the mobile app.

The implementation of categories facilitates the thorough understanding of a given topic, as they would be able to view all related FAQs at a go, instead of having to plough through a list of seemingly disparate FAQs.

Grouping FAQs by categories allows users to see related questions in a screen, instead of having to plough through an entire list of seemingly disparate questions.

The new design replaces tags with categories so that the grouping of similar FAQs is neater and streamlined.

The value of categories lies in its ability to group similar FAQs, and distinguish one set of questions from another. With too many categories, the groupings revert to being disparate and diluted. Thus, we will be limiting the number of categories that can be created.

We have a lot more feature upgrades in the pipeline that we can’t wait to share with you. In the meantime, keep the feedback coming so that we can design the app to suit your needs!

Community

This week, Bernard made a trip to EXIT CO for a quick catch up on how they’ve been using DayOne. EXIT CO is a curated fashion retail store that features global streetwear labels. They have two outlets today at Cathay Cineleisure and Queensway.

EXIT CO’s Cathay Cineleisure outlet

We’re really pleased to learn that Ops Manager Daniel loves the knowledge feature. Daniel used to convey SOPs verbally when onboarding new staff. With DayOne, he is now able to store business related information on the app that employees can easily access. With this feature, employees’ first touchpoint for queries is now the app, instead of the managers. Information is also accessed and gained instantaneously, instead of having to wait for a response from the managers.

Daniel (left in black) and Emmanuel (right in grey) from EXIT CO

People we’re thankful for this week

Big thanks to Rudy from J.CO Donuts & Coffee for taking the time out to speak with us. We can’t wait to have you join the DayOne family!

Rudy from J.CO Donuts & Coffee