4 user experience superpowers that are transforming visual merchandising software

By Cathy Weldon | August 9, 2019
By Susan Zellman-Rohrer, Head of UX and Innovation, One Door | August 9, 2019 | Blog

Intelligent assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Home have rapidly become a part of our daily lives because they make life simpler. At One Door, we’ve thought a lot about what makes these applications so powerful, and how we can apply them to Our platform, our visual merchandising platform.

As a consumer, when I ask for “seafood restaurants near me,” there are four key capabilities that make the response so useful, and I call these “User Experience Superpowers.” These applications know me and the context of my situation (where I am, etc.). They consolidate and organize many sources of information (list of restaurants, menus, hours, prices), they anticipate my needs (help me make reservations, get directions) and they harvest the wisdom of the crowd (capture reviews).

So how do we apply these Superpowers to our work lives? In retail, helping store associates improve merchandising quality represents a fantastic opportunity. Our ongoing research provides a window into significant pain points related to merchandising: how time-consuming merchandising resets are, how difficult planograms (POGs) are to read and interpret, and how many wasted hours are spent correcting merchandising mistakes.

In designing the store associate user experience for Our platform, we’ve used the four Superpowers as guiding principles to ensure we’re building the most effective, friendly experience available. Here’s how we’ve applied them to Our platform:

  1. Knows you and your store. You can see your store/floorplan and rich context regarding your store environment, including the location of fixtures, products and promotional content.
  2. Consolidates all the information you need. Item lists, instructions, PDFs, POGs, forms, etc. are organized into a guided checklist to get you from start to end in the fewest steps.
  3. Anticipates your needs. For example, when you get a damaged poster, a single swipe captures information to report the issue or create an order.
  4. Harvests the wisdom of the crowd. Today, teams can share photos, and future versions of Our platform will continue to expand these capabilities, enabling teams to get help directly from peers and gain reputation points by actively engaging with others in the community.

At One Door, our effort to improve the store user experience is driven by what we’ve learned from our data – store engagement around merchandising has a direct impact on store sales. The more users engage with our application, the higher the compliance levels in stores; and there is a correlation between compliance and sales. In short, there is a direct link between these four User Experience Superpowers and retail store success.

Get a demo to see a quick demonstration of these four Superpowers, and the Our platform store user experience.