Samsung

The re-imagination from the ground-up of Samsung retail e-learning platform.

Special mention to Blanca Hong - the main visual designer on the project.

Iris partnered with Samsung Electronics UK in 2019 to refresh the brand’s best-in-class retail e-learning platform Samsung Backstage. We wanted to build upon the success of Samsung Backstage by reimagining the experience from the ground up, delivering more engaging content and personalised experiences based on user needs, and ultimately driving brand love among retail staff in the UK.

To help achieve this vision, Iris established four key strategic objectives informed by user research:

1 - Platform as habit: Better integrating with our users’ lifestyles and work environment to increase engagement and frequency of use.

2 - Cutting-edge learning: Improving knowledge retention and breadth with a focus on bite-sized learning courses that are more intuitively structured.

3 - Rewarded advocacy: Driving broader brand loyalty by introducing non-financial engagement incentives.

4 - Connect the dots: Proving platform value through the inclusion of more sophisticated and measurable business KPIs.

My role

At this point at Iris, I finally managed to recruit a skilled UX researcher that would enable me to push our user-centric approach even further and this project was a great way to demonstrate their value.

The project needed to really look at the achievements to date of the platform but also truly identify the opportunities for the future, for this reason, I tasked the researcher to meet actual users and interview them to understand what they liked and didn't like about the platform. Those interviews were couple to a survey that was sent to the whole userbase and a deep dive into analytics to get a true quantitative and qualitative view of the opportunities we could leverage.

The insights gathered from the research were summarised into a deck that also contained the personas representing our users based on the research and the behaviour data of our existing userbase. The research deck had a very positive effect on the client but also the team, we now had a solid reference point to guide and anchor our decisions. During that time, we also managed to take a step back and look at what the competitors and other major learning platforms were doing, which helped create our creative vision for the platform.

Once the approach was presented and agreed, we created the sitemap and workflows of the new platform. Following this, I worked closely with a junior member of team to define the core screens of the experience that would then enable them to create a full interactive prototype of the solution.

I initially presented the progress of our work every week to the client but then slowly passed on that responsibility to the junior member in order to build their confidence in presenting the work but also own the experience, once this transition became more natural, I was able to focus more on conversing with the Tech team to ensure the solution was built in the right way. The team and myself then continuously worked with the visual designers and developers to ensure that the guidelines were followed until the new platform went live.

Source: Totara Learning

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Detailed tasks

♦ Survey and interview existing users to better understand what content type they resonate with and what functionalities they could potentially need in the future.

♦ Review e-learning best practices and research competitors.

♦ Build Personas based on the research to summarise the findings.

♦ Define the workflows and sitemap to present the approach to the client.

♦ Create a set of interactive wireframes in order to test the new designs.

♦ Gather client feedback and amend wireframes, followed by the annotation of said wireframes.

♦ Work closely with Visual designers and Developers to ensure the quality of the final solution.

♦ Review and QA the solution once built.

♦ Supervise the team in the delivery of all assets to ensure their quality and that no delay would occur.