Overview
Behind today’s Pomelo: Tap.Try.Buy Service, stands a collaborative and cross-functional team of professionals, with an innovative approach to the omnichannel fashion experience.
It was 2017 and the success of Pomelo’s online business model opened challenging questions about the service and the way it was connected to the brand’s offline presence.
Role: User Experience Design - Team Lead
Platforms: Mobile Apps & Web
Disciplines: Service Design
Tools: Sketch, Zeplin, InVision app, Figma
Site: Pomelo Fashion
Download: App Store
Design Challenge
Our main concerns could be summarised as follows:
- How might we support those users that still feel insecure about buying online and increase conversion rates?
- How might we expand our offline reach so we can build brand awareness, considering how expensive is the opening of new stores?
The answers were intuitive yet so complex.
Product Strategy
Through the customer experience team reports of user reviews and NPS scores, we understood how our customers' main concerns were about product quality and size accuracy. Considering how the product design team was still working on a Pomelo standardized size model, it was just natural that customers were feeling insecure about their own Pomelo Size.
Our first hypothesis was that the online model required introducing the nature of physical contact in the fashion business, like giving the customer the possibility to touch the fabric, experience the color, and try the size before committing to paying for any garment.
Pomelo Pick Up, now known as Tap. Try. Buy, was our way to face the new quest.
We tested the idea at our first Pop Up Store so that the experience was under our own control. Customers would buy online and select our store as a pickup location, with the option to only pay for those items they were interested in.
After five months of iterating and improving features, Pomelo Pickup users were 40% of the total of our Thailand online orders, and that was only one store. Our next objective was to scale the service to any location around the city with a nice, clean, and comfortable space to try the clothes on.
Multi-Touchpoint Experience
2018 was a year of TTB workshops. Working in collab with retail, strategy, marketing, and UX teams we designed an experience that was not guided by our own Pomelo Staff. Our Partners were a variety of businesses from yoga studios, gyms, boutiques, other brands’ stores, and even coffee shops.
As a fundamental tool to support our Partners, we've created a web app. They only needed internet access through any device to be able to connect in real time to our users' apps. This solution would allow us to reduce friction and control the user’s payment experience whilst the partner was in charge of the fitting room experience.
My role as a UXUI designer for the first iterations of the project was to design, test, and support the development and maintenance of the Pomelo Partner App. And also orchestrate a user- center approach to the service on our own platforms: iOS, Android, and Web.
With every new improvement to the service, we moved closer to a hybrid shopping experience, only to discover ever-worsening situations. Very soon we understood how our own Pomelo stores' staff were having a hard time handling offline and online customers at the same time, the fitting room queues were too long as the online users required a different type of support. And this is when our digitally native origin has stepped in to help.
We designed, developed, and tested multiple interfaces to support the Pomelo stores' daily chores, including calling screens, return booths, PomQ - an application to manage the fitting rooms allowing for online and offline customers queue numbers -, and the Pomelo Kiosks (to support the users on the online auto-checkout process at stores).
With time my role as a designer changed from execution to strategic planning. Our recent iterative improvements have been related to high non-show rates, rejection rates, and the lack of clarity on the communication of our value proposition which keeps AOV low even though the frequency of purchase is high.
The opening of our Pomelo Central Phuket store increased the company online orders by 270% where the eCommerce baseline remained the same, and the incremental came from Tap, Try, Buy orders.
With years of experiments, challenges, and opportunities, Tab Try Buy has expanded to even allow our users to try their order at home as a response to the new shopping dynamics during the COVID pandemic.
Pomelo, currently ships to 46 countries globally, and its offline presence reaches 4 South East Asian countries with a total of 26 stores and more than 50 partner stores.
