Salecell
Team REALTOQ
By Sherry Xu, Anuvind Menon, Dheera Tallapragada, Jeff Pak
Summary
The focus of our project SaleCell is on the complex interplay between merchants and shoppers in relation to in-store coupons. Namely how merchant’s need to promote deals and how shoppers can keep track of them. SaleCell tackles this problem two-fold with a Merchant app and Consumer app. The Merchant app allows store managers to create coupons and assign them to BLE beacons. The Consumer app allows shoppers to then receive these coupons on their smartwatch when they walk within a certain proximity of the beacon. Together these two systems strive to reduce the hassle of in-store sales management.
Brainstorming
Our brainstorming session started in the Woz! From our list of 50 ideas, which we brainstormed by thinking of different possible applications, we started narrowing the list by each voting on 5 ideas. From the top votes, we each chose to sketch 1-3 ideas of our favorites. Following our sketches, we had a better idea of how the app would look, which allowed us each to choose our favorite idea. Each of us gave a 2 minute pitch of our favorite idea to one another, to which we each followed up by summarizing the project description as a group. This allowed us to quickly summarize each part verifying that our selected apps would answer our questions regarding target users, problem description, why mobile/watch, and its novelty and creativity. This was really great as we got a general sense of the shape of our ideas and could quickly ascertain the validity of each one. After discussing several pro’s and cons, we officially narrowed down our ideas to 5: Grub, Pill-lan-der, FlashQuiz, Muze, and Proxy AdService. We posted these on a poll within our Facebook group and had everyone vote for one idea besides their own.
Salecell was born out of our ideas to use up and coming technology and maximize efficiency in our lives. Beacons are useful in transmitting bits of information, and are extremely flexible and can be applied in all sorts of situations. We also thought that shopping is something that people need to constantly do, whether it be every few days or every few weeks, and we sought to create something that would help maximize efficiency in that regards.
Sketches and Ideation
SMARTPHONE APP FOR MERCHANT
iBeacon screen: Shows the store map and where the beacons are
Beacon Management Screen: Allows store manager to update/manage beacon ads
Add Screen: Allows the user to customize new beacons or make changes to existing beacons
Preview Screen: Allows for user to see a preview of what the customer sees before they deploy the ad
SMARTWATCH + SMARTPHONE APP FOR CONSUMER
TOQ Screens:
Beacon Notification Screen: Shows the consumer an advertisement upon approaching the range of a beacon.
Add Screen: The consumer can decide to either accept or reject this advertisement. Once accepted, user is notified that the coupon is added to their coupon book
TOQ Home Screen: Landing screen after user has made his choice
Phone Coupon Book Screen: The coupon book application shows all the coupons that the consumer decided to accept via the watch.
Phone Coupon Book Screen: The coupon book application shows all the coupons that the consumer decided to accept via the watch.
Competitive Analysis
When we did market research, we found out that there were a lot of companies in the online coupon industry which host coupons and have a wide range of value offerings. We also realized that the retail industry is giving rise to a complementary industry that uses high technology to offer wide range of services for retail merchants and consumers alike; especially in the space of in-store deals/discounts. We shortlisted a few companies and analysed their services: SnipSnap, Shopular, shopBeacon. Shopular targets price sensitive mobile phone savvy users who shop mostly at malls and look out for deals and coupons on their favorite clothing and accessories. This is a subset of our target group - merchants who want to send in-store notifications on the fly and retail users who want a handsfree shopping experience when dealing with discounts/coupons. But this company could likely be a threat if it combines it’s already mature couponing service with a new in-store couponing delivery technology such as ours. To outcompete their model, we would consider implementing additional features such as price comparison or automatic computation of discounts with the coupon. All of this would be displayed on the watch, so again there would be no need to go out of your way to pull out a phone to receive this information. Overall our product is stronger due to the handsfree watch component, and we want this to be a major forte point in our design.
SnipSnap and ShopBeacon have a very similar value proposition as ours. Their merchant solution uses BLE devices
to deliver coupons to customers on their mobile phones. As such, our app targets retail merchants and smart watch retail users. However, to distinguish ourselves further, we will plan to roll out new features for merchants to calculate in-store customer density so that they get real time updates on store traffic. And for the retail users, we will plan to give them more options to customize the types of in-store deals they want to be notified about on their smart watches.
Wireframes
We created our mockups by using adobe photoshop, illustrator, and framer.js
Merchant App old
Merchant App New
Customer App Old
Customer App New
Initially, we envisioned our customer facing app to function completely on the smartwatch. But later, we felt that too many smartwatch interactions may be frustrating to the user, especially while navigating his coupon book. So, we decided to have phone interactions as well in order to make the user experience smoother. We also decided to enhance user experience by allowing users to filter coupons and rate coupons so that they receive customized coupons from SaleCell. Our final solution for customers evolved the one having two components: the smartwatch app and the smartphone applet.
Personas
Travis is a college student in his 20s who is originally from the Bay Area. He is keen interest in male fashion and enjoys perusing fashion websites to try to come up with more ideas for outfits. He particularly enjoys finding discounted high-end clothing and similarly prioritizes discounted items when shopping. He dislikes the uncertainty in knowing whether a discount is still applicable or not.
When he goes shopping, he is mindful of how much he spends and looks for ways to avoid paying full retail price wherever possible. He is tech savvy uses his mobile phone to acquiring coupons. He also uses his computer frequently to find out about sales online, his smartphone to compare products he found in a store to the ones online. Surprisingly though his methodology for keeping track of what discounts he came across was decidedly low tech.
Anna is an employee for a locally owned retail store in the Bay Area. She and her boss are the only two that work the store due to low traffic; usually it’s only her around. She is responsible for sending advertisements via newsletter, for handling transactions in the store, and for maintaining the store. She likes interacting with customers on a personal level. She dislikes being stretched thin by many customers, as well as rude customers.
Jim is the store manager of a large departmental store which uses technology to a good degree in-store. Jim has little to no control over discounts that happen in the store. Jim is entrusted with the task of having his team set up the store with visible signs of discounts and sales - which is a time consuming and an expensive process. Jim also has the responsibility to determine the validity of various types of coupons that customers bring in if there are systemic issues that don’t allow the cashier to accept the coupon. The store has many in-store sales associates, so Jim doesn’t interact directly with customers. He steps in only when something can’t be handled by the employees. Jim has the authority to make suggestions to the higher officials if he sees value in changing processes within the store.
Scenarios
When we brainstormed about the type of scenarios where our service could be used, we came up with three scenarios for our app.
SCENARIO 1
The store manager wants to give out a new coupon inside the store
In the traditional method, the manager has to manually print out sales and discount signs across various parts of the store - which is time consuming and expensive if the store is large.
Using our service, the manager uses the SaleCell smartphone app and the set of beacons. The manager presses Scan on the “Manage Beacons” screen. When he does this, the app will register the beacons. After scanning the beacons, the manager sees a list of active and inactive beacons in the store. The active beacons are associated with coupons while the inactive ones are not associated with any coupons. The manage can then select an inactive beacon by tapping it. He is taken to the “Edit Beacon” screen. The screen contains information about the coupon like the number of views and the number of people who availed it. He add an image, title and description for the new coupon. After saving that information, the manager can view the newly activated beacon in the list in “green”. The manager then takes the beacon and puts it in the relevant physical location where he wants customers to receive the coupon notification inside the store.
SCENARIO 2
The manager wants to stop giving out a coupon
In the traditional method, the manager has to manually remove the discount signs across various parts of the store - which is time consuming and expensive if the store is large.
With SaleCell, the manager goes to the “Manage Beacons” screen on his merchant app. He then locates the beacon associated with the defunct coupon. He presses on the green button next to the coupon name and presses on ‘deactivate’ button in order to deactivate it. The beacon will now stop sending notifications to customers regarding the discount.
SCENARIO 3
The customer wants to get a coupon for an item he wants
In the traditional method, the customer had to actively lookout for paper coupons or emails coupons of their liking and actively save them. They should remember to take the coupon to the store in order to redeem them. This is frustrating to the customer because they are disorganised and forgetful. Users also don’t want to receive irrelevant coupons - which is hard to achieve in the traditional method.
Using SaleCell, the customer passes by a section in the store. The customer receives notification on his smartwatch that is put out by the beacon. The customer can rate the coupon (4 star rating system) based on how relevant it is to them. The user sees an alert that the coupon has been saved to the SaleCell coupon book on their watch. When the user checks out, he can obtain the coupon from his watch and show it to the cashier. The cashier scans the coupon and applies the discount on the item the customer wants to purchase. The user can also turn off notifications for items he doesn’t want to receive by going to the SaleCell smartphone app for customer. He can go to “Filter Notifications” screen turn on/off coupon notifications based on his preferences.
User Studies
In order to understand the usability of our application, we asked a shopper and a merchant to give us feedback on our consumer and merchant app prototypes. For the consumer we initially asked him about his experiences in using technology while shopping. Then we presented him with our initial prototype and asked him about its thoughts on it as we navigated through its use case.
Consumer Study:
Alvin, when asked about his experiences with using technology while shopping responded by saying that he routinely uses it for price comparisons. When we asked him whether he ever uses it for storing coupons he replied that he sometimes stores digital coupons in his email but mostly while in-store shopping he uses paper coupons, to keep track of deals. We then had Alvin test our prototype but donning a smartwatch and then walking within range of a beacon to receive a coupon notification. After this demonstration Alvin was initially enthused about the technology and noted that it would be more efficient for him than having to cut and store paper coupons. He also then immediately pointed out that it would also be very jarring for him to be constantly receiving coupons while walking around a store. He felt that ultimately this would detract from the shopping experience unless the coupons he receives were relevant to him. Using this feedback we built a coupon filtering feature into our consumer app so that only customers only receive notifications for coupons they desire.
Merchant Study:
When Roger was asked about his experiences using technology while sending out coupons, he responded by saying that he frequently relied on newsletters to do so. He said that a decent amount of traffic to his store would come from advertisements via newsletter, so he liked having those in the front of his store. Roger also said that sometimes customers would often just look at one deal in the store and be single mindedly focused on that deal, but then next week they would come back and buy something that was on sale the previous week indicating that they were not aware of a sale on a certain day of the week because they were so single handedly focused on another deal. Roger mentioned that it would be helpful if customers could know about all relevant deals to them as they traversed the store.
Final Designs
Management Application
From the homescreen we click manage beacons.
From the manage beacons screen we can then click on an individual beacon to edit.
In the edit beacon screen we can then add a coupon image, title, and description. And then proceed to save this coupon so it is now associated with this beacon.
Customer Application
- In the consumer phone app we can filter what coupons we receive by category.
On the consumer watchapp when we receive a coupon notification we are then able to rate it on a scale from 1-4 stars.
We can then navigate to the SaleCell app on the watch to see a vertical deck of coupons arranged in order by rating.
We then select one of our coupons to view and see the coupon image, title, and description.
We chose two different colors for both the management and the customer application to avoid confusion when it came to which user was supposed to be viewing what application. We made the overall format easy to read as before we had received feedback that the text was too light, the buttons were a little bit ambiguous (clickable vs nonclickable) and there were also many other comments on color scheme that we decided to alter. We also took peoples advice that there was too much going on in the beacon management screen and altered that to be more simplistic. We additionally added the customer phone screen to let customers choose what deals they are interested in receiving or not receiving. The Toq design was updated to be more simplistic and straightforward as to what we were receiving on the watch at any given time.
Technical Challenges
The inability to customize our notifications from just text made it difficult to include images or votes into our application. Images for coupons had to be put directly into the cards, and we were forced to designate customers to the deck of cards to take a detailed look into their coupons. The inflexibility of what API we had access to made it so that users couldn’t interact with their notifications either. We wanted to add a voting system into our final application (i.e. 5 stars), but it would have been ideal to put this functionality into the notifications.
The signal strength from a given beacon can be unreliable, so it’s incredibly important to place beacons at appropriate locations. The higher a beacon is, the easier it is for its signal to reach users. Beacons can also be prone to interference with each other based on factors like the beacons’ make, battery life, and proximity. Though it’s hard to account for these technical limitations through our application, providing tools like an interactive map allows users to be more proactive in spacing out their beacons.
It can be hard to identify what a physical beacon correlates to without having access to the smart phone application. Unless the beacon is color coated or has a label on it, store workers can be prone to cluelessness when trying to manage beacons. Therefore our applications requires us to make beacon pairing as clear as possible with little room for confusion. An interactive map in the home page should also make it easier to know which beacon is paired to what coupon.
Summary of Project and Resulting Novelty and Value for Users
Retail merchants have the responsibility to set up signs in their store to make sales and discounts visible to customers walking in their store. This task is ridden with the expense of heavy duty printing and manual labor to fix coupon signs around the store in repeated intervals of time. Whenever a deal expires, the process has to be repeated adding to the existing expenses. Using SaleCell, merchants can now place BLE beacons near the products on sale and remotely link them to coupons so that customers walking by the product can receive instant coupon notifications. The merchant ends up saving a lot of time and effort because he can now manage sales and coupons remotely with a couple of button clicks on his mobile phone.
Shoppers often get bombarded by coupons that they do not need, and sometimes they do not know of coupons in the store. SaleCell targets shoppers as they visit certain parts of the store and displays coupons relevant to them on their smart watch. This helps avoid unnecessary advertisements, displays the information is an accessible way (no need to carry a phone around in your hand), and allows for a more efficient shopping experience.
The idea behind using smart watches is that people suffer from banner blindness and are prone to ignoring ads that lay in front of them. SaleCell pushes notifications to the customers’ smartwatch which vibrates with a message when they go close to an object of their interest. This feature of SaleCell makes coupons hard to miss for customers. SaleCell’s coupon save and coupon personalization features means users can spend more time shopping and less time clipping coupons.
SALECELL VIDEO:
Toq video
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