Iain Heath - Experience Designer, Writer and Mentor.

Knowing who to report what problem to and navigating the different support services had become complex and difficult. Many department reorganisations within the support centre had meant that the organisational structure of the business had become the burden of store colleagues to navigate through in order to know which support service to use to fix a problem. On top of this, the method of contacting the support service was not always the most efficient way to interact.

After understanding the challenges and problems of the current dispirate assistance offering, work started to bring these services together while also making the reporting of problems more accurate and quicker for store colleagues, so that the right engineer would come out and fix the problem first time.

I've not only evangelised design thining and user centred design within teams I work with, the wider organisation and leardership teams, I also wanted to help out the next generation of designers.

I wanted to start to play my part within the creative industry, so I've reached out to mentor people from internal teams, those studying at Loughborough and De Montfort universities and on Interaction Design Foundation courses via RookieUp.

Over a number of stories, I’ve covered a few of the sciences we draw upon in our art as a creative community to create engaging experiences.

'The User Experience is ...' series of stories is regularly read by 5,000 people a week, with many stories being individually read by more than 40,000 people.

We've had a number of hackathons at Sainsbury's over the years, which enables us to create innovate solutions quickly to known business problems. Hackathons have usually took the shape of working in teams across 2 days in the office, although locations have also included Microsoft Innovation Lab, Google and a poultry farm!

Building over 2 days forces the team to be lean and really focus on the value you're delivering to the business and also the end users. This has stood me in good stead to work leanly and put into practise many of the techniques and frameworks within the UX/Product lean playbook.

Working across 2 days means you have to retain a laser focus on value to constantly focus on, and re-evaluate value, within rapid iterations to constantly test and learn. This has been applied to all products that I've worked on.

To provide better customer service, reduce losses and increase availability; Sainsbury’s wanted to understand where stock was throughout their supply chain.

The transformation of the logistics system Plan-It, enabled stores to advise customers when product lines are in stock, or availability in nearby stores, leading to better customer service and customer retention.

Working closely with an Allocation & Replenishment project Sainsbury’s started to see when products were needed and what was driving the demand and ultimately optimising product lines in store, availability & reducing loss of margin through reductions. This presented an annual CAPEX saving of £25m and an OPEX saving of over £120,000.

Vauxhall underwent a UX Audit which culminated in a Usability Study, testing the existing site with real life end users to further understand & support quantitate data and expert improvement recommendations. All of the opoortunities & research were then put to good use in producing an improved prototype to verify with another user group, so that the improvements could be verifed & measured, before they were implemented of the live site.

Once implemented and live these improvements led to 78% increase in online bookings (13,021), using a Average Transaction Value of £79 equates to £1.03m increase

Resorts World Birmingham needed to develop a touch screen kiosk in their new leisure and retail complex to promote loyalty, attractions and provide way finding for visitors.

Wacky Warehouse needed the ability to book children’s parties & also sell soft play passes. With a new mobile first e-commerce platform integration, they got more than that with an exciting new web presence using their new Digital Pattern Library & Branding Guidelines. Key to sharing knowledge & enabling the business to maintain the ethos & spirit of the build.