The Children's Place: Digital Task Management
Company
Client
Date & Length
Role
Tools
Framework
About Brand
The Children’s Place (TCP) is an American specialty retailer of children’s clothes with over 1,000 stores in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, and 90 international stores in 12 countries. The corporation is booming, but it loses millions of dollars in operation costs.
The Problem
The current digital management of TCP retail locations is decentralized and inefficient. This problem has increased the cost of operations are by 6% ($75M). This problem affects the corporate office, field managers and store associates ability to provide, manage, and completetasks, bottlenecking TCP’s goal of reducing the operation costs by 4% ($50M).
The Solution
We were tasked with creating a new Digital Task management system for TCP to distribute manage, and complete operational tasks for the chain of command with greater efficiency/accuracy, and without the problems of bottlenecking of task management, confusion across the chain of command, and travel costs. This will reduce the cost of operations by 2%, meeting their goal of reducing operation costs by 4%.
Discovery
Empathy Mapping
Our team started with an Empathy Map workshop, which included the UX team, developmemnt, bizdev, and The children's place stakeholders. Our session lead to 3 different personas: Corporate Carl, Field Manager Frank, and Store Associate Sara.
Experience Mapping
After having a solid understanding of our users, we created an experience map with TCP team. One of the key findings was that the 3 different levels of management use 3 different device type to manage their tasks. They requested that we kept the same technologies, so we created 3 seperate experiences to work with their current workflow.
Our Solution: Cross-Channel Task Management
From our learnings, we had a 3-part solutions to fit their workflow:
1. Corporate Carl: A Sharepoint web application to oversee and create store tasks.
2. Field Manager Frank: A hybrid app optimized for iOS, for creating store tasks and approving task item submissions provided by Store Associate Sara.
3. Store Associate Sara: A hybrid Review tasks and submit photos for task approval by Field Manager Frank.
Ideation
Whiteboard Sketches
With our outcomes and experiences defined, we started creating sketches of the UI and functionality.
Sitemaps
Flowcharts
Below are some of the key flows for the experiences
Corporate Carl: Sharepoint Web App
Field Manager Frank: Hybrid iOS Application
Store Associate Sara: Hybrid Android Application
