Tesco

PROJECT INFO

Overview

Tesco PLC is the third-largest retailer in the world measured by gross revenues, behind Walmart and Amazon. Tesco operates a wide range of retail formats, including supermarkets, hypermarkets, convenience stores, and online shopping. The company offers a variety of products and services, including groceries, clothing, electronics, household goods, financial services, and telecommunications.

My Role

At Tesco I was Lead Product and Service Designer leading a number of strategic projects that would enhance communication and productivity of Tesco suppliers and Tesco buyers when using Partners Toolkit enterprise platform.

The Tesco Partners Toolkit is a set of resources and tools that Tesco provides to its partners to help them manage their relationship with Tesco more effectively. Partners Toolkit is a scalable solution that consolidates productivity tools and data into a unified and intuitive interface that can be viewed in appropriate channels channels and implements shared features and functionality that deliver a seamless experience across all Enterprise tools.

In-platform Notifications

Project goal

Create communication tool that is part of digital ecosystem enabling better engagement and collaboration between buyers and suppliers by providing the quick access to important information and helping with completion of key business tacks through a frictionless user experience.

Initial problem statement

Trading profit and loss analysis identified that 4% of deals were recognised late equating to £6.5m.

Discovery and Research

Assessing existing notification Contact service that send notification emails to Tesco suppliers. Understand and document end-to-end user experience of Tesco suppliers (Partners) and Tesco buyers (Colleagues) when engaging with enterprise service platform ‘Partner’s toolkit’ through different activities and processes including Induct (on boarding new product), Promotion, Deals, Costs, myProduct Price.

Conducting series of Interviews with partners and colleagues – understanding their needs and behaviours when they engage with productivity tools processes and email notifications.

Creating service blueprints and experience maps to outline touchpoints, interactions, pain points and opportunities.

Contact service process diagram for myProduct: Deals

Enterprise Tools: Service Blueprint diagram - myProducts: Deals

Email notifications – experience map

Idea aggregation and ideation

Based on interviews with Tesco suppliers (Partners) and Tesco buyers (Colleagues) I have conducted task analysis and created personas that outline current issues regarding email communication within existing workflow and emphasise the benefit from in-platform Notifications.

Created storyboards to illustrate how in–platform Notifications will increase responsiveness, improve time taken to complete tasks and increase user engagement.

in-Platform Notifications - myProduct Deal scenario

UI design

Conducted expert evaluation and competitor analysis of current implementation of notification functionality in common social platforms.

Notifications - analysis of common approach

Designed solution that adapts popular feature of Notification to the business needs and improve the awareness and efficiency for Tesco Partners and Colleagues when completing tasks or receiving updates they need to work with Tesco, reducing the internal effort to support them.

Introduced ‘superseded’ behaviour for notifications – new approach based on task completion flow and logic that will manage the amount of notifications in notification panel.

In-platform notifications - designs and prototype

Prototyping and usability testing

I created interactive prototypes in Axure and a task-based script. I tested it on existing Tesco suppliers users, iterated on the designs, and then tested with another set of users.

The outcome of user testing:

Users easily identified new feature
Users responded better to ‘red’ notification badge
There is no need to explain superseding behaviour

Technical implementation

I worked closely with Solution Designer and development team to defined mechanism how in-platform Notifications will be generated: trigger points, integration with existing application ‘Contact service’, created epics for specific use cases across platform.

In-platform notifications - templates generation use cases

Integration process flow

Alignment with digital ecosystem

I have created and facilitated a number of workshops to define multiple use cases for in-platform Notifications across Tesco’s productivity tools and services

Workshop - cross platform Notifications use cases

Outcome

Clear, timely notifications in the right channel increased responsiveness, improved time taken to complete tasks and increase user engagement.

Service that enables delivers operational efficiencies and visibility of all actions relevant to the user – ‘ I know what to do and when, I know what has happened that’s important to me’.
Takes ownership of telling a user what they need to do and when
Uses notification preferences to determine who is notified, when, and in which channel

In-platform Notifications helped bring together the entire experience, making it simpler to navigate between the different parts of the system, and reduce unnecessary journeys.