Confer With
NATIVE & WEB APP • BEST UX SILVER ECOOMERCE AWARDS 2023
As part of a wonderful collaboration with the 'Confer With' team, we delivered a novel product to provide retailers with a live video chat and advanced tools fully integrated within our client's platforms, to bridge the empathy gap of traditional e-commerce experiences. My tasks on the project included Service Design architecture, UX, UI, branding, Design System, and Prototyping.
Lead Product Designer, UX & UI
Confer With users flows derive from two parallel simultaneous users typologies in a shared journey. On one side, the Retail Expert, which can use either a native or the web Expert's version of the App, and the Customer, which experience is based on a web version of the Customer's App on either mobile or desktop versions.
While only retail Experts can access the sales support information through a dedicated navigation bar, both interfaces share a common environment, including a viewport for product information and common access to the 'virtual' shopping basket.
To ensure efficient customisation and scalability the App the design is architecture around a universal UI design system library of visual assets, styles and functionalities.
Jane
The Retail Expert
Retail experts using the App require pertinent information to enhance their selling efforts. While they can familiarize themselves with the interface beforehand, maintaining a high level of mental awareness is crucial due to various factors during interactions, necessitating an expedited interface.
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Dialoguing with the customer.
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Evaluating the customer’s reactions.
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Controlling camera image.
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Identifying and sharing related information available (galleries, related products, alternative products...)
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Minding the physical environment where they are operating if broadcasting from the store floor.
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Evaluating the time dedicated to the conversation and managing availability
Lara
The Customer
At first, customers may interact with the App without previous experience. Due to that, ConferWith interface is:
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Simple and intuitive to use.
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Provide a sense of safety, transparency and control.
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Provides appropriate visualization of both, the video feed and the collateral information.
Demographically, the potential users of the platform are highly heterogeneous, with no particular idiosyncratic or early characterization beyond those intrinsically related to the type of products/services or specific online store audiences.
CORE FUNCTIONS
Beyond two and one-way video and chat tools, the platforms core retail functions follow four key stages and goals.
Facilitate matching between customers requesting support and the right retail expertise
Ensure a straightforward and empathetic connection trought video or any other modallity.
Facilitate information and tools to ensure retail experts can offer the best possible support to customers.
A friendly face, quality information and a shared 'virtual shopping basket' increase sales conversion rates.
THE OPPORTNITY
Through the last decade, and especially in recent years, we have seen an outstanding increase in e-commerce sales, reaching now over a quote of overall sales in value. Despite this sustained growth, many within the retail industry recognize the challenge posed by the empathy gap visitors may experience while visiting their websites opposite to a personalized in-store experience.
THE CHALLENGE
The inclusion of chats and live video has been part of the solutions to approach consumers at a more personal level, but they still lack profound integration with their e-commerce platforms and fell short in supporting the experience from the retail expert side of the conversation.
THE SOLUTION
The ConferWith team led by Serge Milbank had a vision, creating a new tool for retailers to enjoy, simultaneously, the advantages of a face to face conversation together with deeper integration with their e-commerce platforms.
With ConferWith customers enjoy the possibility of a human-friendly shopping experience and retailers can accompany them as if there were at the physical store. From having direct access to products information, alternatives, offers, and related articles, to sharing a common virtual basket with their customers as if there were there next to them.
CUSTOMERS MATCHING
Confer With seeming integration with e-commerce platforms includes visual customization to match their branding and user's journey through controlling background and icon colours, photos, messages and actions.
For a bespoke configuration, the CTA can be presented in different layouts for different levels of awareness. Retail experts are assigned to specific categories of products by the system administrator.
RETAIL EXPERT ACCESS
As a customer request to confer with a retail expert the platform notifies those currently available and assigned to the product category.
Retail experts can, before accepting the call, preview some customer information such as location, product currently visited by the user, and the conversation mode requested.
IMMERSIVE SHOPPING EXPERIENCES
Retailers have access to a set of tools that provide them with the resources to offer a highly personalized experience increasing customers satisfaction and sales completion.
VIRTUAL SHOPPING BASKET
As the retail expert, and the customer, explore products and options together, they both can add them to a virtual shopping basket which can be uploaded into the website main shopping cart at any time, ready to complete the purchase.
SERVICE DESIGN & RESEARCH
Before and during the UX design process, we embarked on a thoughtful definition of the product, MVP functionalities and their dependencies. During this process, holistic expertise and research combined the market's knowledge and prospective users' insights, with the product's business objectives, vision, and technical feasibility.
Approaching the development of a new digital product from the outset does especially calls for comprehensive research of the context, the actors and the required functionalities to establish an MVP design plan.
CONTEXTUAL AND
COMPETITIVE ANALISYS
This research focused on the validation of the challenge-opportunity to be fulfilled by ConferWith.
Findings included that while over a quarter of retail sales by value are made online over 50% of consumers eventually abandon e-commerce sites if choosing is too difficult....and that, while multiple existing services were facilitating more personal online shopping experiences they felt short in supporting retail experts interaction with customers.
FEATURES
MAPPING
By the hand of retail expert Dan Gardner, and supported by surveys, a full breakdown of desired functionalities was mapped and hierarchically structured.
These functional definitions established the foundations for the MVP product architecture, from voice and video chat and into access, administration, product information, collaterals and virtual basket management.
The features were next incorporated as part of user journeys scenarios to map user flows and further define personas and users types of the platform.
TECHNICAL
VIABILITY
One key competitive advantage for ConferWith is its capacity to fully integrate with the host e-commerce platform, consuming data from Shopify, Magento and others in order to provide live information for the retail experts to share with customers or to guide their presentation of products. Additionally, ConferWith allows in-App addition of products to a visual basket for which the App requires to manage live inventory and product variations.
All those requisites determined by the features mapping for MVP were validated as technically feasible functionalities in close liaison with the development team.
LOW FIDELITY FUNCTIONALITIES MAPPING
