Project - Iticket Point of sale
About
iTicket point-of-sale (POS) is a native Android cashier application. It’s built to deliver a fast and easy way for cashiers to sell products in the day tour and attraction segment, but of course also merchandise.
The following customers use the system: Liseberg, Strömma, Norway’s best, ABBA museum and Junibacken, to name a few.
Challenges
I enjoyed this project so much. One of the complex challenges was balancing the speed of a cashier's interaction with a customer, which is usually fast, while also rethinking usability.
This project will cover a challenge: when the team develops a new feature for a large customer that involves scanning season passes at the POS and displaying the information for each season pass, e.g., name, image, validity, etc.
My role
Ensure we improve the POS design. Work closely with developers to ensure the design and flows are highly usable.
A image of the flowchart of the POS with all possible interactions.
How it looked when scanning a season pass.
In the purchase step, one of the most common screens. When a customer has said what they want to buy, the cashier adds it to the cart, and this is the screen before the payment step.
Your specific role in the project and how you collaborated with others
My role is as a UX designer, to make it usable for as many customers as possible. I had great collaboration with everyone on the team. I had a super close collab with both the backend devs and the frontend devs. To help as much as I can with both bugs and new development, and provide design feedback.
This collaboration really helped me understand the system's limitations and where we can explore new possibilities.
How you came to your proposed solution
I read articles about how to design for POS. I did user interviews and tried the system out myself to understand what was difficult or easy to do.
When I had gathered the information, I started drafting simple flows and received continuous feedback from the PM to improve the design and flow. When we were happy, I defined the design and worked super closely with our frontend dev. After she finished something, I tried it on the real product to ensure it was the best.
This iterative process helped eliminate bugs, unnecessary steps, and elements, focusing on the core feature.
Challenges you faced, including design concepts that were ultimately not pursued
The brief itself was not clear. Also, we had time constraints to meet specific dates, which made it difficult to gather the necessary feedback and conduct the required research. We had to design based on assumptions, which is not ideal.
How the project affected the users and the business
The design was critical to securing a big contract. Also, the application at the start was straightforward to understand. It did one thing really fast and efficiently. It was easy for the cashiers to understand what it did with minimal onboarding.
What I learned
This project made me understand how necessary testing is, and also the importance of dialogue with all developers. We worked as a great team and had big wins to ensure an excellent delivery to the client. We also accounted for the fact that lots of other customers want to use this.
But I also learnt that research and interviews do not get the same attention they need in development. I have a great example of when I was at a customer to watch them work. I noticed that they scanned tickets in a certain way with a handheld scanner.
Months later, I helped a backend dev who had an issue with the scanner not scanning tickets. He tried and tried with the scanner, but didn’t understand what the problem was. Then I said, “Have you tried holding the scanner like this?“ he answered “, No“. We tried together to scan the tickets and got the error on the 10th try. This is why research is essential.