New Look
Mobile payments - Queue busting trial
The Team
Christian Mtima: Product Designer
James : Tech Lead
Paul: Senior Product Manager
Challenge
The goal is to improve retail conversion by testing a mobile point of sale (POS) system that staff can use on the shop floor. This trial will run independently from the existing POS system and will not involve the project team. It is designed to be low-risk, conducted over a short period to evaluate customer and commercial benefits with minimal impact on current operations.
Solution
The trial will accept payments via card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, issue digital receipts, and handle sale items and single-item promotions. It will not handle cash payments, staff discounts, gift cards, discount codes, multi-buy promotions, customer self-checkout, printed receipts, direct-to-store concessions, or changes to the store network. The trial will be limited to 5-10 stores to reduce risk and gather focused insights. Customer use is expected to be low, keeping the number of transactions manageable.
Results
The trial will assess customer and commercial benefits, aiming to improve retail conversion while causing minimal disruption to current systems and processes. The outcomes will inform future decisions on the use of mobile POS systems in stores..
Competitor analysis
Prototype journey
This was a standard prototype initially built by the tech engineer without fully considering the end-to-end (E2E) user journey. I joined New Look partway through the project and worked on developing and refining a variety of user journeys. This involved making several store visits to gather feedback from colleagues, which I then used to improve the Figma prototype that I had started building.
Refinements of journey
Due to the constraints of this trial project, a range of use cases needed to be considered and tested with store colleagues. There were many stakeholders involved, and security was a significant concern for them. For this mobile payment solution to be viable, the device was designed to have only one function: processing payments. Features like overrides or returns were excluded, and customers requiring those services would be directed to the tills. As a result, these scope limitations had to be carefully reflected in the UI design.
Colleague feedback
The feedback from store visits and colleagues was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone supported the "queue busting" proposition, believing it would greatly assist during busy store hours. Additionally, it was valuable to uncover different use cases that hadn’t been initially considered, ensuring they were addressed as much as possible in the solution.
Build spec
One of the challenges of this project was managing the variety of stakeholders and navigating the approval processes for the proposition. Initially, we started with an HHT device, but getting approval to build an app for it became a major hurdle. As a result, we switched to using the S700 Stripe device. This required me to update the designs to accommodate the new hardware, such as using the camera for scanning products. Since Android devices lack a back button, I also had to incorporate a back button into every interaction. Overall, the S700 device is more appealing and supports a wider range of payment methods, including chip and pin, and swipe, in addition to the contactless payments that both devices offered.
