#6 User Experience in B2B: Building a Product in the Retail Industry
Being a computer scientist was too boring for Henning. Once he saw Photoshop for the first time he fell in love not only with the tool. He quickly started expressing his ideas on the screen and started working as a freelancer until one of his clients got acquired by the entrepreneur Stephan Schambach.
The omnichannel retail platform NewStore was born and he started as a Product Designer. These days Henning is leading the Design Team and everything related to user research, experience, and product planning. He shares deep and detailed insights about projects with NewStore's clients and how they build a B2B retail product that has touchpoints to end customers.
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Episode Minutes
Table of content
0:30 - Intro Henning
3:55 - Definition of Omni-Channel & NewStore
9:20 - Product development in B2B (real-world project examples)
14:45 - Developing modern point of sale & checkout features
18:25 - Translating customer feedback into design & user experience
20:55 - Challenges with quantitative feedback in B2B (e.g. Google Analytics)
22:40 - Organizational customer feedback funnel
24:55 - Design as a service
30:55 - Early design involvement for the win
38:20 - Design collaboration with Product Managers
43:55 - When & how to say “no” to customer requests
52:55 - Henning’s key takeaways about design thinking in B2B enterprise
55:31 - Debrief Christian & Alex
What is NewStore and what do they do?
Henning: The general mission of us is to bring joy back to retail. And to explain this a little bit further, I have to give an example. Imagine you have a product you want to sell. What you do nowadays usually is to bring up a website e-commerce system and start selling it through the website.
At some point, this product gets very successful and you want to open stores. So, you have stores and the website, and it's the same kind of customer, right? They're browsing your website. And at some point, they're entering your store. Now go back in history and think about all these retailers out there where they at some point started to bring up e-commerce systems.
Since then, it's almost like the retailers with their stores internally compete against the e-com systems and these systems do not very well work together. Also because of the systems, they are not designed to work together. NewStore started with an attempt to build an omnichannel platform. And omnichannel is a kind of buzzword nowadays.
I recently heard a nice definition. “It allows the Retailer to say: Yes!”
Who are the clients/customers that you’re serving?
Answer: Five years ago, we started to focus on luxury retail and we underestimated the complexity of it. And also how many features they were already expecting. When you are a startup and you want to build something very innovative and breaking it changes the experience. You don't want to build the old stuff. So, I imagine we kicked off with a customer where we had a cash button in the app, but there was no proper cash handling.
We didn't talk to the cash drawers. We don't need that... “Everybody” pays with a credit card...
The more you go upmarket, the more customers you want to have, and the more you require these mandatory features. We used to call them “table stakes.”
Our customers are companies like UNTUCKit, Outdoor Voices, Decathlon (US), etc...
Who are your buyers & users of the NewStore platform?
Answer: Our buyers are our users and these people decide to choose us, called “Choosers.” Which is something in the B2B sector. The choosers are the people that actually look for a new solution inside the brand and look for something, a tool that helps them to get their job done in a better way. And then they find a solution like a new store, and then they're evaluating this and then they pay the money. And in the B2B business, it's important to have a good relationship with someone who pays you the money.
And then we have actually the users in our case store associates, for example, who works at a brand and they come in in the morning and they get a product in their hands and say: “This is your point of sale. Use it!” And so we have to carefully decide, when we build new features or if we talk about certain experiences to always address the right stakeholder in this case.
This is really important for us also in the day-to-day business.
How does your Design Team work to build/improve the user experience for your users?
… tune in to learn more 🎧
