Reece Point of Sale
Discovery and Design
Reece Group operates thousands of stores across Australia and New Zealand. They are specialised retailers and wholesalers with complex needs.
After looking at various off the shelf products, the business couldn’t find any suitable solution that would fit their operations. They decided to work on a solution in-house.
The legacy POS was divided into 3 systems; a direct retail processing POS, a scheduled/future order system and quote generator.
Role
Senior Product Designer
Squad
NGP
Company
Reece Group
Company
Reece Group
Research
The key to finding the right solution is understanding the business as a whole. The business is made out of many different arms with specific needs and requirements. Research was key.
We dedicated 3 months to gather as much information as needed.
Branch observations
I visited 14 branches across various Business Units to observe staff interaction with TRS (existing POS) while serving customers. This was done in between Covid related lockdowns.
How:
1-2 observers were present at a branch. Observers stayed out of the way, take notes, ask follow up questions and take photos or videos when necessary
Survey Piggy Back
I ran a satisfaction survey for previous project and added a question about existing POS.
Some of the feedback that came back, validated what we have discovered. Some others, led to a whole lot of other branches to speak to.
We have 41 different feedback.
Some feedback validated the issues that we’ve discovered and some needed following up.
More remote interviews were booked to clarify some feedback.
User Interviews
These were conducted mostly, remotely. I connected with many branches across Australia
How:
1 interviewer and 1 notetaker spoke to one or two branch staffs. Sessions were recorded and I made sure to cover the variety of business units
TRS Hack Competition
During observation, we discovered that there were little hacks that branch staff do. From cheatsheets to sketches to help newer folks.
Running a competition allowed everyone to contribute and gather as many hacks as possible in a fun way!
Competition was shared with Regional Leaders, posted in Workplace (internal facebook) and included in the weekly newsletter.
We had 214 responses. 37 are feedback about the existing system.
The competition revealed many different hacks that different business units use
Total number of branches I’ve spoken to: 56
Key Findings
Legacy POS was not flexible enough to respond to changes required to meet both branch users’ and customers’ requirements
The learning curve was high, according to our users, product search is the most difficult to learn. Took users between 6-12 months to fully grasp it.
Legacy system was not made to cater for all business units.
Branch users are keyboard users. Keyboard shortcuts were ingrained and very important. This was an enabler for a fast and smooth transaction processing.
Other Nuggets
Customers in different state use different terminology to refer to the same products, and in New Zealand, they use product codes
Some business units are not made for walk in sales
Some business units have no delivery fleet of their own and have used Uber to deliver parts.
After the extensive research work, I mapped out the user journey for our retail stores where there are massive overlaps, with the exceptions of these business units: On Site, Viadux and National Contracts. All three do not operate within the retail space.
Design
After a solid understanding of problems and opportunity space, I started on the design work. I worked on a concept where there was only 1 POS system to cater for immediate, future and draft transactions, with the ability to quickly switch depending on the situation.
The objective is to build a POS that is easy to use and has the flexibility to cater to different situation quickly so that the staffs can focus on providing the best customer service and building relationship with customers.
On the left is a snapshot of having customer facing screen with a scanner so they can identify themselves and on the right is the POS screen.
There were a lot of iterations in the design, here is the outline of the process
Design a mid fidelity prototype
Visit store or arrange remote interview sessions to get feedback from various stores and users
Share back results with the team and stakeholders
Iterate on the design and rework the prototype.
As the design progressed, the prototype became more high fidelity. I moved on to using Protopie and Maze.design for unmoderated tests.
I worked closely with the team, and when the design was at 90%, we worked together on the MVP and continuously building to delivery value.
