Think Hub
Project overview
RS Group plc (formerly Electrocomponents plc) is a distributor of industrial and electronic products based in London, England.
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As part of RS Electronic’s objective to become a service orientated company, Publicis Sapient was tasked with identifying opportunities within the industrial engineering supply and support chain.
Role: Lead UX Designer
UX design tasks
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Ideation and sketching
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User journeys
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Wireframing (Figma)
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Prototyping (Figma)
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Agile team collaboration
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UI collaboration
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Team mentoring
UX research tasks
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Persona creation
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Workshop facilitation
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Competitor analysis
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User interviews and facilitation
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Stakeholder feedback
A core strategic team of Solutions architects, Customer Experience experts and program directors including senior stakeholders from RS Electronics was created to work within Scaled Agile Framework.
Our goals were to:
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Identify target demographic
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Understand pain points
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Draft strategic plan and milestones
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Launch Beta proposal within 1 year
Discovery
The initial discovery work and feasibility study was handled by Context Consulting, a market research organisation which helped to hone in on who our users were, which personas we would focus on and what their pain points were.
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This set a fantastic platform for us to define our strategic approach.
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The focus for our MVP would be to offer our personas propositions that would enhance their work within the Food and Beverage sector. Here our target company size would be for companies with 10-100 employees.
Research
With key persona’s selected the task of recruiting, interviewing and initial concept creation began. I created early stage user-flows based on sales data, user feedback and stakeholder assumptions to use as discussion pieces and to collect data points.
10 become 3
After multiple feedback sessions and workshops involving suppliers, customers and senior stakeholders within the business 3 viable proposals were delivered from a potential 10 initial concepts.
These were:
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A product wizard (with initial focus on finding sensors)
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An engineers collaboration space
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A knowledge platform specific to engineers
Defining the Customer Experience
As we refined our user flows for each proposition we began considering what each proposition would feel like practically for our users.
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This helped to highlight:
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Where a user physically was when engaging with the proposition (eg shop floor)
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How would we hand over between mobile and desktop
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How many users would engage with the prototype and at which point
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What outputs could be expected
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How seamlessly would the experience fit into a daily workflow for our engineers
Prototyping
I set about creating low fidelity prototypes to walk stakeholders through the proposed journeys and help us to understand the simplicity or complexity of the UI. We alternated between Sketch and Figma until we settled on Figma. This enabled us to rapidly iterate and better incorporate existing design systems from the client.
Rethinking
The relentless pace of the project highlighted the pitfalls of ‘deliver at all costs’ approach. Poor execution of the user experience led to dissatisfaction from stakeholders and team members. Over selling then under delivering was causing friction and a rethink of the approach needed to happen.
A line was drawn in the sand and an insistence on delivering quality rather than quantity was adopted.
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We managed to prioritise a 'mobile first' approach which ultimately massively improved customer experience and aligned to the original vision.
Working into the details
As the high-level journeys became clearer the detail for each of the proposition elements was defined with a solid attempt at creating an atomic style guide for the front end developers to use.
Testing
The improved workflow between the development teams made room for high fidelity prototypes to be developed and tested.
This had the benefit of delivering like for like experiences to our stakeholders and the testing candidates.
The Beta Release
In the January of 2023 the Beta release of Think Hub went live.
Prioritised delivery of a B2B product finder and Engineers Knowledge Hub was placed before an expectant audience of industry experts, supplier stakeholders, competitors and partners.
With feedback being hugely positive the foundation was set for raising the next round of funding to build Think Hub into the single most important contact point for engineers.
Conclusion
With multiple rounds of user testing and reviewing we took the tentative steps into full blown development.
Having had such a small team it meant there were no real surprises thrown up during development bar those which were out of our control due to third party or iOS changes.
We successfully launched our MVP to the app store in the March of 2018 much to the relief of all involved!
Development continues, but having reached such a significant milestone with a product that is solely owned by its development team is truly rewarding.
As the market shifts we are now able to move at a slightly quicker pace and continually get excited at the potential of this labour of love!