Iain Heath - Product Experience Designer, Writer and Mentor; contributing to design at Sainsbury's.

Product Experience Designer, Writer and Mentor; contributing to design at Sainsbury’s.

Managing the product experience for colleague tools by crafting experiences, so Sainsbury's can continue to evolve, as a modern digital retailer. Using diverse thinking to solve human problems in the modern world.

Writer for UX Collective, an independent design publication built to curate and elevate unheard design voices all over the world (ISSN: 2766-5267). And mentoring at Sainsbury's, Loughborough University, De Montfort University and through Interaction Design Foundation courses.

Want to see the most recent initiatives that have been crafted?

Advising the BBC on viewing sporting event graphics on different screen sizes, viewed at different distances

The BBC Design team put together an advisory panel, made up of design leaders from different industries to provide an independant view of how sporting graphics were presented for different sports on different channels.

Working with a number of BBC design teams, alongside other advisors, we put together principals and recommendations for how the BBC can provide additional visual information to sporting events on large screens that are viewed at a distance, as well as small screens that are viewed nearby. This provided better consistancy across their programming using BBC Sport branding, digital design principals and the BBC Global Experience Language.

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Navigating the different support services and models had become difficult, complex and the burden of store colleagues, after many support centre reorganisations. Contacting a support service was also inconsistant and inefficient.

Understanding these challenges, work started to bring these services together while also making the reporting of problems more accurate and quicker for store colleagues, so the right engineer could fix the problem first time. Saving 23% of engineer visits and 36% through contract negotations, after moving to a self-service model instead of a service desk.

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Eric A. Meyer urges designers to pay attention to the worst-case scenario, to make a better experience for all. This landed at Sainsbury’s doors with no warning on Monday 16 March 2020, when the UK went into lockdown following the spread of COVID-19.

Customers changed their shopping habits overnight and we changed how our physical stores and online delivery operated; quickly becoming a key service to ‘feed the nation’, seeing a year and a half's growth in a few months.

We not only made sure we were able to serve as many customers in a safe way, but we made sure we prioritised and showed up for our elderly, disabled and vulnerable customers in an inclusive, accessible and caring way in by delivering a new customer experience (Grocer Gold Awards 2021 winner for e-commerce initiative of the year).

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Not only evangelised design thinking and user centred design within teams I work with, the wider organisation and leardership teams, I also wanted to support 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. Supporting a number of designers to secure their first design roles.

With Sainsbury’s releasing colleague applications with higher frequency, a digital and device strategy was needed to provide a colleague with a single touch point, to access all the digital tools and information they need, to do their job on whichever device they decide to use; be it a store device (Zebra TC51 or store iPad) or their own personal device.

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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 7,500 people a week, with many stories being individually read by more than 50,000 people.

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With a complex digital estate of tools, products and communication channels, Sainsbury’s needed to cut through the noise and provide a streamlined view of activities in order to sucessfully run the store.

Activity helps colleagues know what to do and when in store, through actionable insights. It supports colleagues to prioritise key trade driving activities, through personalised communication.

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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 a central planning tool to create more accurate and productive resource plans for online drivers and simplify the planning process to get the right balance between online driver productivity and customer availability.

£500,000 worth of driver labour was saved, through increased efficiency and more accurate productivity forecasting to result in more tailored shift planning.

We've used the power of computing to simplify the process. An algorithm now plans 80% of shifts matching previous weeks order volumes to find a suitable plan and provide a starting point for planners.

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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.

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Adding in complementary and convenient services for customers, led to a digital service design, allowing customers to collect online orders, during the aquistion and merger of Argos.

The Click & Collect was successfully delivered at pace and rolled out predominately to the 738 supermarkets and some convenience stores. Also being rolled out to over 500+ Argos stores.

This additional service led to an increase in over 2,650 baskets a week, using an Average Basket Size of £32 equates to £85K increase, which provides over £5.25m in additional annual revenue.

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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

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AA Loans realised that their online application was under performing in a challenging market. This was an untapped opportunity for them to increase revenue, but they were unsure what was and wasn't working.

A responsive 2 step sign up form was designed, using form filling best practise and an intelligent form to help users input information easily.

164% increase in successful application submissions, using a Average Loan Value of £5,000 equates to £33.75m increase. The number of starting the application process and not completing was reduced by 72%, leaving only 28% of total applications not being completed

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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.

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Following on from the major success & overwhelming ROI of the Responsive Web Strategy, Spirit Pub Company needed to outline a vision & approach for a mobile app roadmap to gain engagement from the business.

Engagement from the business was key, so workshops and white papers were created and presented back, which led to the design and development of a white labelled app to be used as a base for all brands, layered on top with brand specific functions and design.

iOS Android

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.

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A mix of User Centred Design and common sense help to produce pragmatic solutions to well defined problems.

Discovery of business, customer and user needs help form a strong problem statement, which can then be used to help guide business and design decisions.

This can be set against industry research in order to contextualise the solution in the current and future marketplace.

Ideas are then free to be explored and evaluated against a solid set of objectives, KPI's and the original problem statement. Bringing ideas to life to make them testable with end users is key to understand how well the product is performing.

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Iain Heath - Experience Designer, Writer, Speaker and Mentor.

Advising the BBC on viewing sporting event graphics on different screen sizes, viewed at different distances

Allow colleagues to report and manage problems in store

Responding to the COVID-19 global pandemic

Mentoring those wanting to get into User Experience Design and the creative industry

Provide store colleagues with a single touch point to access all the tools they need to do their job

Writer for UX Collective on Medium

Provide a central activity and reminder tool to help colleagues run a successful store

Serial Hackathon winner

Providing a tool to reduce workload and create more accurate online driver plans

Giving stores clear visibility of what's on deliveries

Create a destination for customers by providing Sainsbury's customers with another reason to shop

Listening to users & understanding your audience

Optimising online KPI's

Creating a digital touch screen kiosk that provides way finding and promotes loyalty

Mobile App Strategy for Spirit Pub Company

A new visual language to enable parents to book a kids party from the sofa, while they are in bed!

Interested in what I do ... or how I do it?

Brands I have worked with …

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