We created a differentiating retail experience for Windows Phone devices, tapping into consumer behaviors, desires and needs to provide a relevant, self-service experience across all Windows Phone devices worldwide.
Help differentiate Windows Phone devices from competitors in the retail space, sparkling consideration and purchase intent in consumers.
Windows Phone came to life at a time where brands where fiercely battling for consumer’s attention. Our lean team did a deep dive in consumer behavior research and we found out that most consumers didn’t want to interact with store staff while initially browsing for mobile devices in-store.
We knew we needed to create a retail experience that could tell the right message, at the right time. Retail environment constrains are tough: we knew we had five seconds to get their attention using no more than seven words. We knew that once we got their attention, we had 30 seconds top to tell a relevant and compelling story, and just after that, a maximum of a minute and a half to take them through all relevant features.
We embarked on this project at the back of Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia devices, and we needed a radical new way to develop experiences that enabled Microsoft to deploy the retail experience fast, at a world-wide scale and without issues.
We created a lean, fast-paced, prototyping process defined by Anthony, called creative progressive prototyping. We had only a core team of a creative, a visual designer, an experience designer, a producer and three hands-on engineers. No other people, including managers or executives were involved in the project.
We worked at a fast-pace, creating working prototypes at a rate of 40 variations per week. We would have a day-long workshop with our client once a week, were we would take him not only through the output, but also to the process, so we could clearly see the process and line of thought. This would allow us to understand why we made decisions and correct them if needed in a very efficient way.
This process allowed us to move at a lightning speed, with a core talented and hands-on team that were completely focused on developing the best self-service interactive retail experience possible, in the least amount of time.
The experience architecture was created as a layered system. This was vital since we knew the consumer experience will have to be changed and adapted according to each new device, different features and markets and different partners.
The system allowed the experience to take into account the device, the country, the language, the operator and even the version of the OS, providing a solid platform to deploy experiences from Microsoft’s CMS system for all Windows Phone devices worldwide.
We worked hard to optimize the consumer experience, to make it responsive, attractive and reliable, while requiring as little storage and memory space as possible.
We spent 5 weeks on this prototyping phase, creating more than 40 prototype variations of the retail experience. By the end we had narrowed to a single solution that we had tested with real users and was ready to go into production.
The huge advantage of our process was that by the time we started the production phase, the experience was mature, tested, and optimized, so the actual production time took just three weeks.
The Windows Phone Retail Experience was installed in every single Microsoft Windows Phone device at the factory and shipped and enabled in every single retail display around the world.
The scale of the operations was massive. However, we barely experienced any production or live retail issues whatsoever. The experience helped Microsoft to drive consideration and intent purchase, successfully differentiating from other competitors within the limitations of the market share and Windows Phone life as a platform.
Progressive Prototyping creator and lead, technical research and architecture, project scoping and budgeting, technical direction and mentoring, team management, client technical liaison, lean prototyping process management, task management, prioritization & tracking, delivery and rollout coordination.