Kohl's x gener8tor Summer Program

Creating a better family shopping experience in Kohl's shopping center

UX Design • Internship • Industry Sponsored

During summer 2018, I participated in a joint-program hosted by Kohl's and gener8tor and closely worked with Kohl's engineering team to create a prototype of a new shopping cart with an GUI. I worked with Josh Dezler, customer experience innovation engineer and developer to design, develop and test the UI on an interactive device installed on one of the shopping cart prototypes.

This interactive device aims to create a better shopping experience for family shoppers as they were the primary customzers for Kohl's Milwakee store. Besides of that, it also helped to streamline the shopping experience with reuseable components for future platforms.

Responsibilities

UX Research: Competitive Analysis, Persona Mapping, Journey Mapping, User Interviews
UX Design: Sketches, Usability Testing
Others: Interactive prototype on mobile platforms, rapid prototyping

Debrief

May 2018 – August 2018
Industry Sponsored Program with Kohl's
Industry Lead: Joshua Dezler
Project Team: Marcus Fang, Chongxi Yuan, Huanran Li, Jingqi Duan, Joshua Dezler

Tools

Sketch
Android Studio
Google Suites
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Experience

Overview

During the 3-month long summer internship experience, I'm lucky to team up with 4 profesional developers to work on the project together, and were mentored by the Kohl's engineer team with many talented profesionals, led by Joshua Dezler. During the session gener8tor also helped us to crowdsource volunteers with Kohl's. Since this project is currently protected under the NDA, please reach out to me via LinkedIn or email if you would like to know more about this project.

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White.

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Black.

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Blue.

My Role

I took the responsibility of initiating the user research on both software side and the hardware side as well, including an assistive shopping cart and an interactive screen with Kohl's alternative version of their website placed on it. I worked with a team of senior engineers, senior product designers and ux researchers, along with 3 other UW-Madison students together during the 12-week long summer program.

This program aims to help the senior shoppers at Kohl's retailment stores, to make them have a smoother shopping experience with assistive considerations. To start an user-centered research and design, I concepted, designed and tested the prototype with various interface design solutions, and conducted a comprehensive user-testing sessions during the later weeks of this program.

Along working with the engineer and research teams, I also collaborated with talented professionals in the retail and e-commerce departments in the UX Research state to have a comprehensive understanding of how successful UX designs could boost the market performance and customer's experience when shopping at Kohl's.

Takeaway

Delivering Inclusive Designs, think what we forgot
This program helped me to understand what issues senior people faced when performing seemingly 'ordinary tasks', and made me reflect my previous design thinkings. It is the first time that I realized how inclusive design could greatly help senior people to improve their quality of life.

Learning Assistive Design via HRI
This project also helped me to understand how successful Human-Robot Interaction designs could be used in assistive design. Successful hardware and software design are necessary to create a reliable device for the disabled people.
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Coordination, Team-player and Collaboration
Working in a team with multiple stakeholders, it would be crucial to constantly engaging with them and provide updates to receive useful feedbacks and get the entire project on time. Effective and efficient communication is one of the key factors for a successful collaboration.

Balancing, Multitasking and Revising
‍While it could be tough to handle so much task during a short period of time, effective multitasking helped me to scale down the project into different minor tasks and gave me more room to revise each individual task to avoid confusion.
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Testing, Testing and Testing with Feedbacks
‍It is important to hear the feedbacks from users during the user testing stage. No matter how the product behaved, user's input during this stage is useful and could be decisive for improving future designs.
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Embrace the Ambiguity
Many unexpected hurdles could appear when working on a project. Keep calm and try different approaches would help you along the way.