merchAR
10 weeks | Jan-Mar 2019 | Brainstation| Toronto, Canada
merchAR uses AR technology to build virtual displays prior to attending a trade show making the trade show experience more efficient and streamlined.
The Challenge
Trade shows are great for showcasing the latest products within an industry and to make important connections between companies and customers. Buyers attend tradeshows to discover these new products and meet vendors to establish working relationships, and ultimately to start buying these products for their stores or businesses.
Trade shows are sensory overload.
It's loud, there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, each booth is trying to entice you in with flashy graphics and interactions. Working with retail buyers over the years, I would see them return from these shows completely exhausted, talking about how overwhelmed thyey felt at the show, or how disappointed they were that it wasn't as successful as they hoped it would be.
I wanted to design a solution that could help buyers be more efficient when they attend trade shows and improve the interactions that they had with vendors at the trade show.
Empathize
The focus is intentionally on buyers attending trade shows and not consumers.
Buyers have a need to find products that is essential for their business to be successful. They face pressure from their bosses to justify the cost of attending these trade shows, and need to generate business relationships with vendors.
Consumers looking for the newest products and trends for personal reasons and don't feel the same pressures and don't have the same needs.
Primary Research
Based off previous experience working with buyers, the trade show experience could be broken into 3 key phases: preparation, attending, and follow-up
Interviews were then conducted with buyers that attend at least 3 trade shows a year, to understand more about these three phases:
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What information are you looking for when preparing for trade shows?
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What is the experience like when they arrive at the trade show?
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How does this impact the way they build business relationships with the vendors they met?
Key Insights
Finding new products is the main motivation behind attending trade shows
Currently, the amount of research that can be done prior to the show is limited and not product focused.
It's very difficult to remember everyone you met and the products you see
Preparation is the most important phase. Without preparation, you won't be efficient, and will make building relationships challenging
Define
Persona
Opportunity Selection
Within the current state of the trade show experience, the bulk of the work for Lillie takes place at the trade show.
The first idea was to focus on a solution that addressed the frustration of not being able to remember the people you'd meet and products you'd see, as that appeared to have the biggest impact on determining if the trade show was a success.
This was too narrow of a focus and didn't address her experience as a whole
Each phase of the trade show compounds onto the next phase. If you don't prepare for the show beforehand, you won't have a plan for which vendors you need to see, and could end up spending majority of your time talking to vendors that don't have the correct products or won't be useful relationship to build.
But it's not enough to just get Lillie to do more research beforehand. As discovered in the interviews, the pre-show research is quite limited and not product focused.
So the opportunity is in enhancing the information available beforehand and shifting the amount of work that can be done before the show, in order to streamline the whole experience.
HMW help buyers be more efficient when attending trade shows?
Ideate
Task Flow
The task flow reflects the main user stories for functionality required for the solution. These user stories capture the needs that buyers have and the reasons why they attend trade shows:
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As a buyer, I want to discover new products, so that I can stay on top of the trends
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As a buyer, I want to organize products by the different categories I buy for, so that I can compare them when making my decisions on what to buy
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As a buyer, I want to meet vendors that I can start a working relationship with so that I can continue to buy their products in the future
The buyer scrolls through a product feed with AR models of products, selects the product they like and adds it to a virtual display, meanwhile a list of vendors to see is being generated based on the products that have been added to the display
Concept Sketches
The initial sketches looked at how to present the most important information that Lillie would need or rely on to feel prepared for the trade show: Product Details and Vendor Information
1. Product images to keep the focus on product discovery. Inspired by Pinterest's masonry style grid
2. Cards to organize vendors and visualize products by category to compare them
3. List of vendors at the trade show with a way to add them to a more curate and specific list, creating a plan for who to visit at the trade shows
Prototype
Lo-Fi Wireframes
As the sketches moved into Lo-Fidelity wireframes, the organization of vendors and products evolved into the visualization of products within displays. This would be achieved through the use of Augmented Reality technology, taking pictures of products and inserting them into category specific virtual displays.
The ability to compare products, or see how products would look cohesively in store, would be a huge benefit for buyers, as they look at the products in their store cohesively, not as individual products. As well, currently, most buyers will take photos of products, so bringing them all together will help the buyer to stay organized.
Test
User Testing
The concept of taking a photo to generate an AR model of a product, to then put into a virtual display is unique. This flow needed to be tested so that users understood what they were seeing and doing.
The transition between virtual displays and generating a list of vendors to visit at the show needed to be tested to see if it was clear and intuitive.
These key findings shaped the iterations that followed:
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There were questions about the technical constraints of taking a picture and the system knowing what to crop or not
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Users felt like there was too much going on without a clear hierarchy of information and it was a distraction from the task that needed to be completed
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Users found the transition between displays and vendor information to be disjointed. As well they felt unsure where they were when they were performing certain actions.
Iterations
Product Scrolling
With apps like Pinterest and Instagram, scrolling through product images has become a widely recognized and understandable pattern.
Now, rather than take a picture of a product at the trade show, to discover products at the trade show, there is now the ability to scroll through all product images to find ones of interest that can be added to the virtual displays.
Version 1
Version 2
**An assumption was made here that vendors at trade shows would be willing to upload digital product images prior to the trade show. Assuming that if buyers are able to be more efficient, it would also result in vendors having more meaningful interactions with buyers that are actually interested in their product and more likely to build a business relationship.
Soul/Heart/Body Analysis
This analysis was used to understand what is the most important information in order to strip away the extra and unnecessary clutter. This helped to simplify the vendor and product information pages the most.
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The soul is the very core features that make the concept unique
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The heart is features that make the soul make sense
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The body is nice to have but may or may not be necessary for the prototype
Information Architecture
The information architecture was refined to create a clearer narrative, and help with the issue of flow and disjointed transitions.
As Lillie is discovering products she's interested in, she adds them to a Display specific wishlist. This will allow Lillie to continually scroll and discover products without having to put it into a display each time.
Once Lillie is satisfied with the Discovery phase, she can now work on building a category specific displays by taking products from the Wishlist and putting them into her display.
The app would then generate a vendor list based on the products within a display, giving Lillie a clear and actionable plan when she arrives at the trade show.
The Final Deliverable
The final prototype strips away the excess to focus on thdelivering the two main outputs
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Visualizing product displays by using AR models of products.
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Organized and accessible vendor information based on othe product displays which allows buyers to have a plan for the trade show to maximize their efficiency
Both of these outputs will allow buyers to do more effective preparation beforehand. Armed with a list of products of interest and vendor list, they will be more effective at the trade show, which will lead to building stronger working relationships.
Next Steps
Thinking about what's next for merchAR, there are 2 main focuses:
1. What would this look like for a vendor? How could it add value to the vendor's attending trade shows? The information and data about which products are being added to displays, will help vendors to know which products to focus on.
2. Continuing with the application of AR, once the buyer arrives at the trade show, AR wayfinding could help to guide the buyer to their vendors
