Helping customers identify a product, find a product, and know how to use a product; for a faster and easier shopping experience
IDENTIFY, a QR code feature implemented throughout tensuke market, allows customers to scan a QR code in order to redirect them to our website where they can identify a product and learn how to use it.
Our team aimed to make shopping at tensuke market more accessible, inclusive, and user friendly. Since implementation we saw a decrease in user uncertainty and an increase in employee availability due to less questions directed towards them.
My role for this project included advocating for accessibility in relation to those with cultural and language barriers, conducting research, designing the end-to-end product, testing, website building, and collaborating with the assistant director.
The Japan Marketplace has historically had a largely Japanese customer base, however within recent years our businesses have grown in popularity leading to a larger English speaking user base.
Many of our new users are struggling with identifying what a product is, finding the product they are looking for, and knowing how to use it.
In our aims to provide a more inclusive service we interviewed dozens of our customers and employees within one of our businesses to discover pain points experienced by our customer base.
We provided our customers and employees with a list of pain points and asked if any applied to them, we also asked if they had any additional frustrations within our store. From our interviews we discovered the most common pain points were finding a product, identifying a product, and knowing how to use a product. Many users pointed out that they can't read Japanese so they couldn't read the instructions and/or sometimes even identify what the product was.
With a Value Proposition Canvas we looked at products & services that could alleviate our users pains and gains creators that could lead to user gains.
Our team decided that the most space efficient, user friendly, and easiest solution would be to use QR Codes that would redirect the customer to our webpage with images, English product names, and English instructions on how to use the product.
After sharing our plans with our employees we discovered that new products were constantly coming in and being swapped out. To put all of our products on our website would mean having to constantly update our website. Furthermore, a lot of our products were the same product but from different brands and including them all would lead to information overload for the customers viewing our website.
Our solution was to put up only the type of product, our most popular products, and our most consistently in stock products.
Our customers come into our store with a task approach; they want to be in and out as quick as they can and as such we focused our design on:
Our vision was to create a layout that could fit multiple products while still being informative
Once the QR codes were set up we asked our customers if they could find a product using our QR code. Customers were able to find products, and interestingly we discovered that some customers were using the "control find" function on their phones to quickly browse through our products listed on our website. Customers were able to find what they were looking for online and then use the photo on our website to find the product on the shelf even when the product only had Japanese written on the front.
We placed scannable QR codes throughout the store.
QR Codes redirected the user to our webpage with available products in that section with image, English name, description, and instructions
We interviewed stockers and cashiers to see if the QR codes lead to a decline in customers asking for help in either finding, identifying, or knowing how to use a product. Employees were asked to rate on a scale of 1 - 5 of how helpful the QR codes were, 1 being Very unhelpful, 3 being no change, and 5 being Very helpful. From our interviews it was revealed that 100% of cashiers and stockers reported some level of decline in customer inquiries for assistance, which as a result lead to an increase in employee availability to do other tasks.
Furthermore, an observational study was done to see if customers were actually using the QR scans. This was done in an effort to get raw unbiased data. Our observations revealed that customers were in fact using the QR scans. After viewing the customer scan the QR code they would then browse our website and pick a product off our shelf.
My initial thoughts were that some people, especially those on the older end might struggle using the QR codes. I learned that QR codes are becoming more and more present in peoples everyday lives. Many restaurants are swapping out menus for QR codes, stores are letting you shop on mobile by using QR codes, people are adding friends on social media using QR codes. Our customers were able to use our QR codes with ease and this function is becoming more normalized in todays society.
