COLO
COLO is a mobile app designed for small independent brand clothing stores, which helps store owners sell clothes better. It enables users to better manage stores from intelligent inventory management, classification management, and sales report.
Problem
Due to the increasing demand for online shopping, physical stores gradually disappear from customers’ visions. Many small independent clothing stores in China have bankrupted because of dismal business. To amplify the benefits of offline shopping, this project put an eye on helping stores owners manage the store more efficiently, thus providing more responsive services for customers.
Timeframe
Interview
To understand the specific sales situation of the shops, I interviewed the staff and owners of 7 brick-and-mortar clothing shops in Nanjing. Questions include tools to count sales, dealing with hot selling clothes, and reasons for losing customers.
Persona
2 personas were created as archetypes, to illustrate stakeholders’ concerns, needs, goals. There is also background information such as age, gender, occupation, and skills that help to foster empathy for specific users.
Current-state Journey Maps
2 current-state journey maps illustrate different stakeholders’ frustrations when selling clothes, which help to identify existing problems and brainstorm solutions.
Competitive Analysis
5 existing products related to supply chain management were analyzed from 4 dimensions to evaluate products in price, functionality, popularity, and aesthetics.
It is discovered that more beautiful products are providing more flexible services for users. They are also more expensive than those with complex functions.
Mind Map
By analyzing customers’ willingness of using digital tools, I summarised pain points from the customer journey map. I tried to create possible solutions through a mind map and display them as onboarding interfaces so that users can easily know the main functions and use them intuitively.
Onboarding Interfaces
Inventory Management
Inventory Manager provides 3 primary services. Users can put items in stock by using scanning functions. They can also scan or input order numbers to track items. To avoid manual calculation, after putting all items into the warehouse, the number of stocked items will be counted automatically.
Category Management
This function can help to categorize different clothes, users can add more detailed information on specific clothing. Those supplement information can help to find clothes location, numbers, and prices, so that shop clerks do not need to know every clothes information well.
Sales Report
Sales Report allows users to view sales of the store straightforwardly. Users can switch different types of charts to compare current sales with a previous business. The “Recent Transaction” section can help to know which product sells the most to deduce fashion trends and stock more clothes about fashion elements.
