Approach Rock Gym Management Software
Description
This was an amazing opportunity to contribute user experience and interface work to an impressive startup called Tile 5!
Approach is a new generation of point-of-sale and gym management software including calendaring, inventory, as well as customer and employee management. Interface complexities arise from employees needing to work in multiple work flows concurrently (i.e. checking-in members and watching for flags on accounts, while also selling items to another customer or group).
The Problem
Climbing gym employees have a strange mix of responsibilities to manage which range from the mundane (i.e. vending candy bars and renting gear) to the extreme (i.e. monitoring swarms of hyper children playing on terrain that can seriously injure them!) and they often have multiple flows they execute concurrently.
The software they use to manage common tasks has to reduce the cognitive load demanded from monitoring each task concurrently under potentially high volume conditions and over-stimulating sensory demands.
The Solution
A live-search driven store with strong hierarchy and simple functionality allowing users to exert minimal focus building carts, alongside a check-in stream with dual-coded iconography to reduce cognitive load required by monitoring the flux of incoming patrons to a level manageable by peripheral vision.
“Justin’s work improved our app and our team’s efficiency. I knew that Justin was creative and talented, but what I learned from working with him is that he has the ability to look at a problem from multiple perspectives and determine an objective solution.
— Andrew Potter, Owner - ROKC Climbing Gyms; Tile5; Approach”
PoS Concepts
Away from “Amazon” to the flat waters of working memory
Let users key in whatever is intuitive to them, then filter and serve database items to build carts and complete sales without making them think.
Employee Context: Employees must build shopping carts for customers (or even a potentially large group of people) all while tracking the check-in statuses of patrons entering the facility which can become high volume quickly.
Challenge
The project had been following an Amazon.com model when I was brought on board–and I was asked to sketch some layouts following those patterns, but also submit some of my own alternatives.
Findings
After interviewing employees and managers of the rock gym owned by Andrew Potter, a partner in the project, it became obvious that web-retail was a poor model for our purposes.
Amazon, for instance, benefitted at the time from a distracting and ungainly checkout process that encourages people to keep discovering more products and continue adding items to their cart.
Solution
Employees at rock gyms, by comparison, need to be able to build and modify carts with minimal cognitive load as dozens of members of a single party hurl items at them while they simultaneously monitor lines of people checking in and filling out required legal waivers.
I found that due to the repetitiveness of the job, users have a reliably strong command of the list of products they sell, so a live search would allow them to quickly key in a few characters of any related term (Brand / product / size / service type / etc) to find and add items to shopping carts with very little attention. Strong, simple hierarchy would give users quick access to the primary functions they need to identify and manipulate inventory items in the system with little cognitive effort.
Customer-Employee Swim Lane Analysis: The final system will end up with multiple interfaces facing multiple user types while they also interact with each other verbally. In order to keep track of potential interface interactions I did a quick and dirty swim-lane analysis of Customer-Tablet-Employee-Terminal sales process.
Agreeing with Developers: To help communicate & agree with the developers on the structure of store and checkout screens, Maps of the system interactions of a user navigating in the store.
Shopping Cart & Checkout Concepts: Some sketches showing the evolution of the PoS interface from a web-store style interface to a live-search and interactive cart combined into a single screen allowing for a sort of sandbox approach to cart-building.
Patron-facing Check-in: Some concept sketching working out different looks for the patron-facing tablet interface
Interaction map of store and checkout flows after a process of sketching prototypes and having several rounds of meetings with users and developers to determine most promising direction.
>> Small-screen mockup of concurrent screen and check-in flows. Although this did allow the user to track the two primary flows together, in practice it became obvious that we could simplify the appearance and combine the shopping cart and check-in with users toggling between the two at the right without navigating away from the store or account paths in the center of the workspace.
>> Small-screen mockup of checkout screen.
Customer account & check-in concepts
I was also asked to take some passes at building out account management screens and cards. (Sketch, InVision) >>