From Online to In-Store: Personalized Retail Journey Powered by Adobe & Microsoft
Company Adobe & Microsoft
Introduction Date January 14, 2018
Project Website
Why is this project worthy of an award?
In the past 18 months, a narrative has developed that brick and mortar stores in America are dying. Headlines about the death of the mall are constant and foster a sense that the industry is on an inevitable downward spiral and that only Amazon and Alibaba will seemingly prevail. This narrative is misguided, but it’s very much a reality that retailers need to innovate to remain competitive. Personalization is the holy grail in retail and traditional retailers must adapt and leverage technology that creates fluidity and personalization across online and in-store. Through Adobe’s partnership with Microsoft and the companies’ cutting-edge machine learning technology (Adobe Sensei and Azure Machine Learning), retailers are empowered to deliver precisely this; bringing customers in-store via digital touchpoints. Let’s take a look at what’s possible: Imagine you’re at home watching TV and see an ad for a new pair of shoes that catch your eye. You ask a voice assistant, such as Cortana, to pull up the shoes. Through Adobe’s content management offering Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target for personalization and Adobe Sensei, the shoes are pulled up, along with other product recommendations like a complimentary purse and a similar pair of shoes. Based on where the shopper is in the journey and situational context, the recommendations will adapt automatically. You can also obtain information such as pricing, material, etc. – all via voice and without leaving your couch. And that same personalized content can be leveraged on any connected device, meaning you can switch from your mobile to tablet to desktop and receive a consistent experience across each device. Before purchasing, if you want to try on the shoes in-store, you can open the app and geolocate the closest store. Upon arrival, there’s a digital screen featuring other shoppers who’ve shared their images and reviews of the latest spring line. From that screen, you can quickly search to see where the shoes are located in the store and how many are left, making it easy to find as a consumer and driving the purchase for the retailer. Customer relationship management data from Microsoft Dynamics 365, such as previous transactions or online product views, is combined with Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Target to create and deliver highly personalized and engaging experiences across any device. Adobe Target’s Auto-Target uses advanced machine learning to serve the most tailored experience to each consumer based on not only his/her individual profile but also the behavior of previous visitors with similar profiles, to personalize the experience. This gives consumers the feeling that everything was designed for them individually – a true differentiator for retailers.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
The innovations here are twofold – first, Adobe’s internal innovations in marketing technology and machine learning, and second, the innovations generated through its partnership with Microsoft. Adobe’s partnership with Microsoft is a deep, native integration of the companies’ technologies, which creates a unified view of the customer and enables retailers to personalize experiences across all touchpoints a consumer has with their brand. This is a feat that shouldn’t be taken lightly. A complete customer picture has long been one of the biggest challenges brands face, leaving consumers disgruntled with a disconnected experience.
Who worked on the project?
• Dave Welch, VP, Microsoft Solutions, Adobe • Michael Klein, Director of Industry Strategy, Retail & Travel & Hospitality, Adobe • Dina Apostolou, Director, Microsoft Business Applications
View the project video: https://files.acrobat.com/a/preview/3555fa08-1f2a-434f-a095-a634d9731e5f
Fyrn Stemn System
Why is this project worthy of an award?
We believe access to cheap labor and the proliferation of planned obsolescence have disconnected people from what is truly a quality product. The name Fyrn, pronounced "fē, yərn/," is an Old English prefix that means ancient, of old. We come from generations of people that take pride in working with their hands to make useful and beautiful things. Drawing from our roots in furniture making, we are dedicated to furthering these meaningful traditions and values. The furniture and items that you bring into your life, should be considered choices informed by how products are made, where the raw materials are sourced, impacts of production, and whether the item can serve its function well. Furniture should be beautiful and comfortable, built to last but also capable of easily being repaired or recycled instead of disposed of. These are the principles that drove the design of Fyrn Stemn. We started with furniture because it’s basic, you live or work with it every day, it’s a natural gathering place for people. If you know the story of a chair’s origin and you live with it for decades, then it begins to hold a value that is greater than the chair itself and that’s something that can be passed on and shared. While the notion of handcrafted furniture is often romanticized, it is only accessible to a small number of wealthy individuals and does not have a significant impact on reducing the waste of our planet’s diminishing resources. We believe that in order to create a path away from an unsustainable and disposable culture people need to see the benefits of products being manufactured in plain sight. San Francisco is expensive and has a lot of barriers to manufacturing efficiently but this is where we live so we relied on creativity and innovation to help us overcome these constraints. Through the design and engineering of custom machines built in-house and unique manufacturing processes specific to Fyrn Stemn we have created the prototype for a micro-facility that can produce furniture of handcrafted quality in significant volumes. These smaller facilities are replicable and with scale we can drive down the price of the furniture and make it accessible to more people. At the heart of the system is the patented Stemn bracket which enables the furniture to ship flat and easily assemble at home without sacrificing strength or durability. Also developed in-house, the Stemn packaging focuses on making home assembly as intuitive and satisfying as the product itself. Fyrn offers an alternative to disposable culture, emphasizing thoughtful choices from design through delivery, including responsibly harvested lumber, minimizing waste, and using recyclable packaging, but we believe the most sustainable path is to produce a product that lasts. Durability combined with an easily repairable system is the true strength of Stemn, and we think a necessary innovation to conserve the planet’s resources as a booming population increases demand for objects in their homes.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
Living in San Francisco in 2018, it is nearly impossible to get a cup of coffee without overhearing a conversation about innovation, disruption, product design, engineering, reinvention, or the reimagining of something. Our company is at the epicenter of technological innovation, where incredible changes are taking place at a rapid pace every day. However, very little of that conversation is centered around local manufacturing, and with good reason, San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world. We find it both ironic and exciting that in a small space in the middle of the Mission District, we are focused on developing an innovative system of manufacturing and furniture that harnesses old world ideas while solving problems that have existed in the furniture industry for more than a century. In addition to having an impact on individual consumers, the commercial furniture market is also huge and we believe the Fyrn Stemn System is designed and built to provide a more efficient solution in that market as well. The Stemn bracket and system of furniture were refined through a 5-year iterative design process that included testing in high-traffic commercial environments. Initially, we intended these tests to provide accelerated wear and tear so that we could gain confidence that the furniture would last for decades in home environments. But, what we discovered was that the furniture was not only durable enough for commercial spaces but when unforeseen circumstances occurred (like a 600-pound planter being dropped on a bar stool) we could have a chair back in service within 24 hours or as quickly as we could deliver new component parts. Because we store inventory in component parts and pieces that can assemble just-in-time we can provide much shorter lead times than most commercial furniture producers, which also makes us a great option for late-stage project needs. Since our furniture can ship unassembled or partially assembled, we can move large quantities long distances at a substantially reduced transportation rate. Additionally, when commercial schedules shift, which they always do, we simply shift the final assembly or delivery window. Most other manufacturers don't have that flexibility, so furniture dealers and commercial customers end up needing to take possession of the furniture and pay to warehouse it until final installation. This flexibility allows commercial projects to invest more of their dollars into the quality and design of the furniture instead of the transportation and logistics, resulting in more exciting and beautiful spaces. Finally, all of our chairs and stools are customizable by wood finish, bracket color, and upholstery making them versatile enough to fit a multitude of design environments. However, if our offering doesn't suit the needs of a commercial client we can customize the finishes of the furniture to match the aesthetics of the project. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of our system, or at least that which has taken the most creativity and grit, is accomplishing all of this with a small team while avoiding raising outside capital.
Who worked on the project?
Co-Founder and President: Ros Broughton Co-Founder and CEO: Dave Charne Design and Fabrication: Derek McCall Art and Creative Director: Mik Gaspay Architect and Designer: Cam Helland Art: Chris McNally Fabrication and Build Team: Earl Gonzalez Machinist: Dan Boyle
View the project video: https://vimeo.com/217883567
Gather - VR Grocery Shopping
Company WOKEstudios
Introduction Date January 31, 2018
Project Website
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Gather - VR Grocery Shopping is a concept design exploring the possibilities of shopping for food from home using virtual reality and then delivered directly to your door. Gather's VR experience and delivery service is aimed at making grocery shopping more accessible and pleasurable to the elderly and individuals with reduced mobility. We learned that, due to factors like fear of falling, bad weather, and poor transit options, a large percentage of this population is malnourished due to lack of access to healthy foods. Through the Gather VR experience and delivery service an individual can shop in a relaxing and beautiful environment and then have their order arrive in their home. Gather also improves the grocery shopping experience for anyone with clever features - finding products by voice, selecting ripeness and size of produce, visiting the farm where the product came from, predictive shopping lists, connection to diet-tracking apps, personalized store layouts, and a potentially infinite selection delivered right to your door. When creating Gather, the biggest challenge was developing new UI interactions that worked for grocery shopping, at the same time that we were coming to grips with the technical limitations of the headset and controller we were using. Since we were designing for mass-market VR headsets like Google Daydream and Samsung Gear VR, we were limited to one-handed interactions and were unable to let the user reach out to pick up objects directly. In response, we developed a system where users could summon an object by pointing at it, inspect it and turn it over as though they were holding it in their hand, and point towards their shopping bag to add it to their inventory. Because many users had mobility issues and because the Daydream and Gear VR can't track walking movement, it wasn't feasible to let users walk around the virtual store. As a result, we developed a teleportation system that let users point to an area of the store that they'd like to visit. By interacting with overhead signs, it was possible to teleport anywhere in the store, even to sections that were far away.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
Unlike other VR shopping platforms which are retailer-focused, Gather was designed from day 1 with the user in mind. Delivery is now a common convenience offering for many companies, but for Gather, delivery is core to the product's value. Although we considered our primary user to be people who find it hard to get to a normal grocery store, we wanted to make sure the design was simple and accessible enough that anyone could use it and find it preferable to actually going to the store. With this in mind, we created several unique features to augment the standard shelf-and-cart model of grocery shopping: - Selecting ripeness and size of produce - Virtually visiting the farm where the product came from - Predictive shopping lists - Connection to diet-tracking apps - Personalized store layouts Although we initially created a set of features based on encouraging users to buy healthier foods, users found them patronizing and we later adopted a simpler approach to handling health concerns - simply don't stock the worst foods. Gather puts the focus on great produce and a wide selection of quality ingredients instead. One of the most delightful interactions we created was the ability to "summon" an item from the shelf. Almost everyone who tried it laughed in surprise the first time they saw it happen, and then laughed again when they realized clicking on the shopping bag several times in a row would send a stream of fruit flying into the bag. Since a brick and mortar grocery store is an interface that everyone understands how to use, we wanted the environment of the store to feel familiar, while adding new features to improve the shopping experience. We redesigned the store environment to look like a greenhouse, which gave a more natural feel but let us maintain the familiar structure of shelves, tables, and signs. It was important to us and to our users that we create a space that's nice to spend time in, instead of feeling draining as grocery stores commonly are. As one user said during an early test, "The store shouldn't look like Walmart, or else people won’t want to spend time here." Gather is aimed at making healthy food more accessible to seniors and people with mobility issues, but we also wanted to make sure the design was simple and accessible enough that anyone could use it and find it preferable to actually going to the store. By encouraging a healthy mindset towards food consumption, we can also reduce the load on the healthcare system, especially from seniors who comprise a huge portion of healthcare and support costs.
Who worked on the project?
Afshin Mehin - Owner Jason Miller - UX Lead Scott Forsythe - Design Researcher/Art Direction Trista Capitano - Visual Designer Zach Yamaoka - Untiy Programer Alex Honeywell - UX/UI Vanessa Liu - UX/UI Christie Chan - Visual Design
View the project video: https://vimeo.com/268901645
Getaway
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Getaway was founded to counter the negative effects of modern life and its digital distractions built by design. In an era of deep work-life imbalance, we’re seeking to improve quality of life and health of millions of Americans. We are overworked: we left 662 million vacation days on the table in 2016. We’re overconnected, spending 8+ hours a day on addictive digital media. Worst of all, we’re stressed out: 60 percent of us worry about money, work and the future of our nation. Getaway is a intentionally designed experience to allow people to combat these issues by going back to the basics: unplugging, being truly social, and getting outside. Our Outposts, just two hours outside of major cities, host a collection of tiny cabins, nestled in nature. Every step of the process, from booking to building a fire to check out, is meant to be seamless and without any need for planning. We encourage guests to explore deep conversations with loved ones and to enjoy the present moment by locking away their phones in one of our custom cellphone lock boxes. We hope to build counterbalance to people’s lives, not only when they go on Getaways, but in all areas—we’re starting with our own internal team work culture. Our user experience blends both digital and concrete design features: unique to the hospitality world, our technology team has created an innovative way for our guests to check in with custom key codes, while we implement interior design, signage and booklets to facilitate an experience that is meant to be completely analog. We offer guests a guided user experience that’s off the grid in, off the clock, and completely connected to the present moment and loved ones. Central to our philosophy is the intentional design of tiny cabins which facilitate the guest experience. Guests can choose from a fully-furnished two-person or four-person, pet-friendly tiny cabin equipped with: kitchen supplies, a stove top, mini-fridge, shower, toilet, fire pit, and queen bed(s) for a good night’s rest. WiFi is purposefully excluded, phones are encouraged to be locked away and instead guests are provided playing cards, games, classic books, a guide to analog activities (think: knot-tying, deep questions to ask your partner, and stargazing), and fire-building tools complete with S’mores ingredients. Our approach is working. In 2015, we raised $15 million in a Series A after rejecting funding from Shark Tank because we believed our idea – and our valuation – was higher than the sharks gave us credit for. Today, we’re operating Outposts near New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C. Occupancy has exceeded our plan, and our Net Promoter Scores are an outstanding 81 (the hotel industry average is 41, and the top NPS hotel score is 78).
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
We’ve spent so much time obsessing over guest feedback and design, and have settled on three main design features of our tiny cabins that are integral to the Getaway experience: Big Window: One of our most talked about features by our guests is our big window design. The big window provides a view out into the forest or the natural environment that is just outside—and a queen bed is placed right next to the window. The concept behind this design is to sleep in nature: one can go to bed gazing up at the night sky and then wake up with the sun, adjacent to the trees. The window is our equivalent of the TV screen one finds in hotel rooms. When guests arrive, the blinds are intentionally drawn to frame the experience as one designed to be in the natural world. Small space: Our tiny cabin design intentionally creates a sense of intimacy. Close quarters with everything that you need and nothing that you don’t facilitates intimate conversations, and strips down excessiveness. Here are the cabin features: · Queen size bed for sleeping · Table for eating, board games, just hanging out · A Kitchenette: mini-fridge, two-burner stove · A full bathroom: toilet, shower, running hot water · An outdoor fire pit, picnic table, Adirondack chairs (durable and comfortable) Emphasis on using natural materials: Our cabins intentionally use all-natural materials as much as possible. We forgo artificial items because we value authenticity. Our wood is Eastern White Pine and the exterior is stained a natural color meant to blend in with the environment. The key idea is that we’ve created a space made of natural materials, which results in a seamless transition between the outside world and inside the cabin: both are centered on drawing from the calming aesthetic of nature. What all of this design culminates in is the ability for guests to stay a few days without ever having to leave, as all of their basic needs are met. More thrilling to us, we can feel our mission to build counterbalance resonating with our guests: they report being invigorated, relaxed, more at ease. They also report finding relief in finally being able to ‘disconnect; joy in the sights, sounds and smells of the natural world around them. We’re really proud that we’ve been able to design an experience that has such an impact on our customers’ lives.
Who worked on the project?
Jon Staff & Pete Davis, co-founders
View the project video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI8rmc-w2gk
Gladly Customer Service Platform
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Any human-centric design process starts with empathy. Understanding people’s needs, aspirations, and frustrations is what takes designers down a path to come up with innovative ways to solve their pain points. Yet when it came to the customer service industry, unfortunately, we found that empathy had been deprioritized for speed, metrics and productivity. At Gladly, we set out to reinvent customer service for that reason. To understand how Gladly is different, it’s helpful to take a step back to examine how legacy technology works today. When a customer reaches out to a company, they're issued a 'ticket' or case number so the company can track its progress. This worked in the 90s when there were only three types of support (in-person, email and phone), but this model doesn’t fit with how today’s highly connected consumers communicate. People today aren’t reaching out via a single channel anymore — they’re chatting, texting, using Facebook, Twitter, and switching between these channels interchangeably, even as they're having one conversation. Legacy customer service platforms can’t keep up with this new way of communication. Each time a customer reaches out, they're dealt a new 'ticket', and an agent isn't able to see all the disparate tickets are about the same problem. This results in three main problems: (1) a frustrating experience for customers who have to repeat their interaction history at every contact, (2) unnecessary and lengthy work for agents because they can't see multiple tickets relating to the same issue, and (3) most importantly, since every interaction is considered new, agents have no context to build connections with customers. To tackle these problems, we turned the traditional customer service platform on its head and focused on what was most important: the people at the heart of it. We focused on the customer. We built Gladly to center around the customer, so that instead of ‘tickets’, it's the customer that gets routed. That includes every interaction they've had with the company - regardless of communication channel - and their history of transactions. This provides agents the rich context they need to help customers with their issues, build relationships, and simply treat them as people. We focused on the agent. Before we built Gladly, we observed and talked to dozens of customer service agents to understand how they worked, what they cared about, and their pain points. We found that the legacy platforms were clunky, complicated, and required workarounds by agents who simply wanted to help their customers. We took those lessons and designed Gladly to be powerfully simple: by using interaction and visual paradigms from consumer messaging software while encompassing all the powerful features expected in enterprise-grade software, agents become productive in a tiny fraction of the time it usually took them to learn other software tools. By starting with empathy, we’re designing a future where a contact center isn’t just a place for complaints to be heard, but where real, lasting relationships can be built. This is human-centric design taken to whole new level.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
Gladly is the first and leading product in the market taking customer service from the standard case and ticket model, to one that focuses on the person, completely redesigning how companies do customer service. By putting people at the heart of every interaction, we’re transforming the contact center from a place where only complaints are heard, into a place where people are having real, empathetic conversations with people. It’s also guiding contact centers to rethink how they hire, reward and incentivize teams, and how they design their workspaces, now that customer service agents are moving from transactions to interactions, through seamless, empathetic conversations. As Forrester Analyst, Kate Leggett, comments, customer service vendors today just aren’t equipped to offer deeply personalized experiences. With Gladly, that’s starting to change. Customers feel cared for and have options. When customers are treated like people instead of numbers, they have a personalized experience. They can connect with agents using the communication channel (chat, email, Twitter, text, etc.) that’s most convenient to them, and can switch between them at will, just as they would in their everyday conversations. Because agents have the full context of a customer’s past interactions, customers can simply continue where they left off - no recap necessary. Agents are empowered and highly productive. We built Gladly to help agents work smarter and more efficiently. Agents are familiar with our user experience because it’s modelled after the mobile messaging apps they know and use everyday (e.g. people don’t need to be taught how to use iMessage or Facebook messenger). This means agents are trained in hours, instead of weeks, resulting in a major cost savings for our customers. And, within five seconds, the agent sees the history and context they need to establish trust with the customer. Companies see lower costs and increased revenue. With Gladly, companies can finally connect with their customers on a personal level, engendering trust and loyalty in their brand. Because agents have a complete customer history, call times are reduced dramatically, which means agents can move on to the next conversation faster. Jetblue, a Gladly customer, sees these benefits everyday. With JetBlue, we were able to get the team from coffee to conversations with real customers in just 5 hours. Compare that to weeks, even months of training on other software platforms. And, for many of the businesses we work with, they have peak and seasonal times when they have to ramp up agents to handle the workload. They are able to get those seasonal workers up and running more quickly with less training. After evaluating over 100 technology solutions presented to them, Jetblue chose Gladly, based on the strong alignment of their shared vision for the future of customer service. Gladly is being rolled out to their nearly 3,000 customer support agents, (what they call “crew members”), so customers can communicate the way they want to communicate, while agents can stay focused on the most important piece of it all - the customer.
Who worked on the project?
Joseph Ansanelli, CEO and co-founder Michael Wolfe, VP of Engineering and co-founder
View the project video: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1MaMuaiF9tY-LxXPDTatVz9BTF0Erw4no
