Coors
Case study: User interaction design
Challenge
In 2005 Coors Brewers began developing a new software application for their sales team. The aim of this application was to ensure that sales team members at all levels were able to carry out a number of processes online in a consistent way.
Coors and IOKO (Coors’ technical solution provider) asked us to develop customer journeys, functionally complete user interface wireframes and final screen designs for the application.
Solution
We began by hosting a number of workshops with Coors and IOKO to fully identify the customer journeys and functional requirements. These workshops helped us to develop a greater understanding of the variety of roles and responsibilities within the Coors sales team.
Using a technique called ‘personas’ we created a number of fictitious characters who might use the application, as a way of understanding their breadth of experience, skills, motivation, background and position within Coors. This enabled us to define the full scope of the application and how it needed to appeal to each user within the team.
Working from an existing functional specification we then developed a number of process flow diagrams followed by detailed wireframes of each screen of the application. This helped to bring the detailed functionality of the application to life in a visual way and further identified additional requirements that were added to the specification.
The wireframes were progressively refined after each workshop until we finally produced a visual design for the application based on the approved wireframes.
Results
The workshops and the wireframing process identified a significant number of new requirements and features to the Coors application which had not been considered previously.
This not only enabled Coors and IOKO to develop a much more detailed and complete specification for the project, but also gave Coors a more realistic view of their requirements and the costs and time implications associated.
