Douglas Azevedo About

Slide Neomarket
One-week design sprint to validate a self-checkout app.

(Jan 2020)

Slide The product I was a designer working for Accenture when I was given the challenge to help one of the largest supermarket chains in Brazil to come up with a concept for self-checkout. Besides me, there was also a UX researcher involved in this project.

The business main pillars relied heavily on accessibility, low prices and client-needs first.

Before moving on with the project, however, they asked us to design an MVP prototype to test with users in the real world.

The logo and name have been changed to comply with NDA. Day #1 Desk research.

Mobile payments and self-checkouts are not exactly new products. The question is: why haven’t they become the to-go options for users?

What can we learn from these existing products?

To answer these questions, we dove deeply into some articles online and client’s metrics from their existing app.

At the end of the day, we brainstormed our ideas out.













Balancing users needs with business expectations turned out to be the biggest challenge in the discovery phase. Apart from privacy concerns, we acted on a value proposition chart along with PMs to guide us through the process. Day #2 On day #2 we designed together a value proposition considering the topics we drew together on the brainstorming session. The value prop was:

1) To innovate with purpose;

2 Convenience for user;

3) Savings;

4) Safety;

5) Accessibility and privacy. Also on day #2 we filled a H.E.A.R.T. framework to measure success. Day #3 We took the third day to design some initial use-cases and flows – always considering, obviously, this was supposed to be an MVP. High-fidelity prototypes we designed based on the client’s design system. Day #4 We spent the 4th day running a guerrilla testing in different locations where the supermarket operated.

To be honest, I can’t quite recall users’s feedback since our UX researcher was way more involved than I was at this step. A few highlights though:

1) Clients felt overwhelmed doing long grocery shopping;

2) It was difficult to use a shopping cart or similar things and use phone;

3) Most of them ended up preferring using traditional cashiers. Day #5 Finally, we gathered everyone’s feedback – including stakeholders’ and decided the product concept was far from going to market especially for cultural reasons. People don’t feel comfortable with the whole self-checkout experience. Our main takeaways for future iteration were:

Store
Consider waiting in line indicators, users adoption x revenue and NPS.

Revenue
How much revenue is being generated on the app?;

Implement a sales funnel dashboard to identify pitfalls of the experience;

Business analysts can study ROI x long-time revenue.

Clients
Besides NPS measuring, we can do some shadowing with users to see how comfortable they feel.

Also, we mapped that a sort of member-get-member approach could be a good strategy to boost product after lunch.