- CLIENT: Instacart & Caper
- ROLE: Lead Product Design
- Conceptual Design
- User Research
- Personas & User Flows
- Information Architecture
- Heuristic Assessment
- Wireframing
- Rapid Prototyping
- User Testing
- Style Guide & Hi-Fi Comps
- Rapid Prototyping
- Front End Development
- Delivery and Integration Support
Overview
This project, Caper Cloud is an internal tool that tracks the telemetry of smart carts, pushes AI updates, keeps track of users in the system and analytics.
The vision for Caper Cloud, is a mission control for the Caper Smart carts, delivering real time information on who is shopping, what’s in their cart, what the customer is purchasing most often, and pushing AI updates to the carts.
Problems & Opportunities
With the number of deployed devices continuing to increase and spanning multiple time zones across the globe, the Caper Cloud gives us the ability to ensure a reliable experience for our shoppers and partners alike. Caper Cloud is an access anywhere, on any device, web application, which houses multiple apps that are built with specific focuses in mind.
Roles & Responsibilities
As the lead designer on this project, I worked with a fantastic dev team, a great PM, and sought the input of the design & dev team for feedback, especially to a/b test, to deliver this tool.
Goals
- Build Design System for Cloud + 5 apps to ship for 2022
- Remote Management - responsible for handling carts, audits, and issues remotely
- User Management - responsible for managing users of Caper Cloud.
- Analytics - responsible for reporting on Counter & Cart usage for both Instacart and 3rd Party Partners (Krogers, Sobeys, Wakefern, Food Cellar, etc.). Including Aramark Reporting - a branch of analytics specifically for Aramark.
- IoT - responsible for deploying AI Computer Vision and other updates to carts remotely
- Receipt Recall - responsible for sending receipts to consumers post transaction.
Starting Points
I spent a good deal of time on researching what other competitors were doing both manually, and with AI in terms of customer grocery shopping and also how large grocery clients, such as Kroger, Food Cellar, Aldi's and others handle everything from supply chain to margins. From that data I built out workshops, brainstorms, customer journeys, and flowcharts of how customers might move through the apps to accomplish their needs.
IoT Devices
The IoT sections is the module responsible for pushing AI component updates. It is an interactive interface that gives release engineers a way to conduct CV updates as well as make necessary firmware updates remotely, to any cart, anywhere.
This dashboard is designed to allow very specific AI package release targeting based on device, store, retailer, partner or regional metadata. Becauase releases may be staggered both in terms of carts and release versions, it's important to show that information to engineering, from a top level, large batch view of all carts in production, to individual cart components.
Receipt Recall
Receipt recall is a feature that was created after some asks from a client of Caper Cloud. Receipt Receipt recall is a way for any customer to get a copy of their receipt after the transaction has taken place, anywhere from 10 seconds to 120 days. The primary use case is where a person needs to have purchases verified for expense reports, and secondary use is a feature rich receipt system for any consumer.
Using the filters, any transactions may be filtered by card number, date, location and so on to quickly find the transaction and provide a receipt sent by SMS or email directly to the customer.
Remote Management
Remote management is a real-time view of all carts, giving staff associates a dashboard to monitor active devices in-use and remotely assist shoppers proactively. From a security perspective, this is determined by SOC-2 and Auth0 to ensure the customer, whether store manager or Caper admin, has the purview of all devices within their role.
Caper Remote Management is designed to be the eyes & ears for on field team members and helping our shoppers always feel connected and supported as they shop. At a local level, this makes it easy for a store manager to see if a shopper is having trouble with something with an item, with the cart, needs verification of alcohol, and more.
User Management
A directory of users, stores, retailers and partners, which are tightly coupled. User Management is more than a directory. It shows relationships between ad-hoc groups, B2B, and liaisons between admins and customers. This gives a visual representation of who’s working on what and, crucially, who the points of contact are.
Users have accounts to access Caper Cloud & Admin / Staff sections of our devices. This is where users are created, assigned a role and access to certain levels of data.
Additionally, users are provisioned access to certain apps as well as the specific functions within an app.
Results & Impact
Within 10 months, Caper Cloud was conceptualized, planned out, designed, platformized and launched with a design system, and five apps. I Worked directly with an embedded team dev team pod of 6 front end and backend devs, with 3 PMs, and 2 stakeholders across both Caper & Instacart.
I was responsible for all design work & direction, research, & documentation. I worked with PMs, & stakeholders on planning, and metrics. All this was only possible through close communication via slack, & video meetings, & committing on key feature sets via design docs. The real value here is not the smart carts, nor this project, but being able to show partners like Krogers the hard data on exactly how their customers shop, and why.
Chad Rawlinson
Lead Product Designer
Caper Cloud
"Gaining a deeper knowledge of telemetry, cart metadata, & pushing AI updates and and how it impacts management of Caper carts has been incredible. I am proud to give my customers, both internal colleagues, and 3rd party clients better tools to work with. Having seen how better management of the carts behave on the back end and how they are developed fills me with optimism towards a future where results are exponentially increased. It's been a fantastic project to work on with Caper Cloud, and this tool has laid the groundwork towards how to utilize these apps to provide intelligent systems that deliver incredible results."