Role: Research, User Testing, Clickable Prototypes, Product Design, VQA
Company: MikMak
MikMak provides eCommerce marketing analytics and enablement software to accelerate online sales for brands. A MikMak eCommerce URL can be used either as a standalone landing page linked from an ad, or embedded into a brand's website.
The page includes dynamic retailer buttons for online shopping and nearby locations. Beyond selling more products, brands leverage MikMak to gather data about the retailer and product preferences to influence strategy.
At the beginning of this project, MikMak was expanding from supporting grocery brands to other categories, specifically alcohol. In order to best support the sales of alcohol, we needed to provide a better in-store product locator because most sales of alcohol happen in stores.
We would need better in-store data, and identified the interest to integrate the leading alcohol retailer and distributor data source provider called VIP (Vermont Information Processing) into the MikMak platform. This would expand our retailer data providing a better user experience for shoppers and allowing our customers, and brands, to learn more about shopper behavior.
Our challenge was to identify the best way to leverage this new data source so that we could provide the following for our customers:
I conducted extensive user testing to truly understand the problems customers were facing. I also uncovered additional points of friction along the way. With this feedback, I redesigned the flow and continued testing iterations until ultimately landing on a final design geared towards usability and desirability.
I kicked off the research by learning how VIP data was being used in existing alcohol brand websites. We quickly found clear patterns and a range of existing implementations to choose from. I focused on identifying the key patterns we would need to leverage the data, and performed user testing to identify the most usable solutions, and then compiled them together. By pulling the best patterns we would create something new, yet familiar.
To expedite feedback I simply ran user tests on actual websites (stonebrewing.com, etc) to find out which patterns are most intuitive.
The launch of this project was extremely positive for the company and the customers. "Positive market energy and feedback about VIP - “OMG I need this” “The next big thing for sales to lean into”. Diageo and Annheiser Busch are like WHAT?! Others said this was "The Holy grail - we can finally explain the full customer journey"
Continued expansion and demand for this integration have significantly given MikMak a leg up in the alcohol space and plans to expand this functionality to more verticals are already in the works at the time of this posting.