I was contracted by Lowe Profero to work on the QIC Urban Utopia project in Q2 2015.
UX Strategy
QIC’s vision is to provide the ultimate urban utopia shopping experience around the pillars of Open Platform, Community and Destination.
Much of the work was to translate some very high level ideas into practical application. This included items such as a ‘way-finding app’, providing support for pop up shops and event areas, allowing pre-ordering and pick up of food, special offers delivered to mobiles as users walk by for example.
The main deliverables were an app, responsive website, wayfinding totems and other in-centre displays. This required a very high engagement level from users, and so there needed to be many ways to lead users to download the app and interact with totems, join community and other events and become aware of the high service levels on offer.
For this to happen, I decided that the website needed to ‘Surface the Possibilities’ and allow people to become aware and then engage. Also I ‘gamified’ the experience on multiple screens so that users got more and more benefits for using the app.
QIC’s motto for the centres is ‘Something new for you every day’ – which to me meant that the assets needed to centre around personalisation - and so all digital assets are designed to collect data about users preferences and interests so that the right content can be targeted to them e.g. sales, events, promotions. This will happen both from their own input e.g. what they’re searching for and clicking on, and via collection of personal data which will identify them using profiling companies such as Inivio – data will be merged and washed to enable targeted marketing. Rather than large up-front forms, data will be collected only when necessary for the function the user is accessing, over time.
To encourage take-up of the app (and giving data), users will be driven to download it for continuous rewards (including seamless shopping), Loyalty rewards e.g. a free valet park.
Personas (Click to enlarge)
Important functions by platform and persona
Initial sketches of the cross-device experience
Wireframe Example
For more detail, please see the wireframe link in the left hand side column, but please remember that these wireframes are incomplete because my contract ended. Note that the way I work is to create all pages and then place items on pages quickly, then refining and repeating the process until the wireframes are ready for user testing. This is why you will see lots of items placed quite haphazardly at this stage.