Sam's Club Bakery - Order Cakes Online
Sam’s Club bakery offers a cake and cupcakes ordering and customization service at their retail stores across 650+ location around the US. This business was all manual and paper based with a lot of pain points from the bakery associates, consumers and business. In order to capture nuances of the business and serve customers better we set on a Lean Startup journey to transform this entire business to digital. A cross department inter-disciplinary team was assembled to deliver on this project. Working in weekly experiment cycles, team was iterating at a fast pace incorporating user feedback. We ended up designing a multi-channel experience with kiosks for in-store traffic, order processing kiosk for bakery and a responsive online site to truly eleminate all pain points.
Week 1
A Lean Startup consultant was hired to teach us this methodology and walk us through how to create a minimum viable product (MVP) in a one week sprint. We started with a business model canvas, created story boards, user flows, affinity sorting, wireframing and created a quick and dirty website for ordering cakes. All this in one week.
Week 12
We took a deep dive to know everything about the bakery business, it was operating smoothly and was perfected by bakery associates. We wanted to create a smooth transition between the offline system to digital transformation. Understanding operations, supply-chain, order fulfillment, competitive online solutions and the service model. We started by replicated existing paper experience to online and week after week talked to our customers. We understood a lot about how our customers wanted to customize cakes and what was important to them and the associates making the cake for those customers.
We iterated in the spirit of fail fast fail often improving discoverability of cakes, browsing the catalog and customization experience.
Week 24
Once the MVP was established, technicalities were determined, infrastructure requirements and business needs were adderssed we could focus on the experience. We leveraged our brand's personas; understanding their priorities, preferences and motivations. On looking deeper we identified micro-personas that were embedded in those broad personas. Busy moms, office managers and homely moms, aunts and grand-mothers were our customers. We intercepted them in the store and went to their offices to do ethnographic research. We wanted to know everything about what was important to them and why cakes and cupcakes were such an important element of all big or small occasions.
“I just came to check the catalog. I know you guys carry character cakes. My son is crazy about Pikachu Pokemon so I thought I’ll come and see what’s there at Sam’s (flips through the fat catalog, till she concludes that Sam’s does not). When is this online thing going to be up? I could use one right now. ”
Week 48
By this time we had developed and tested a mobile ordering experience, web experience and the associate facing order intake experience. Increasingly we shifted our attention to in-store experience and built a kiosk experience. We placed the kiosk at various location in the store, we iterated on various interaction patterns and began to polish our visuals and end to end experience. In the spirit of Lean Startup we touched on every digital aspect and communication of the experience including confirmation emails, reminder emails, reminder texts, order receipts and order detail prints.
Associate Kiosk
on site tests
Designing the Kiosk experience: iterations and explorations
final flow and details
Design for pilot rollout
