Bolt App

Bolt app is a project that I worked on at Walmart. It is part of our Express delivery initiative for our Mexico market. We partnered with third party Crowd source pickers to enable this project.

In a brief, our customers can choose “Express delivery” as their delivery option while placing online orders. The picker gets the order details on the Bolt app. A Picker is a dedicated third party resource whose only purpose is to pick the ordered items and keep it ready for delivery within a set amount of time. Bolt app will enable our pickers to complete the picking process in the most efficient way within a set amount of time.

Problems

• ≈40% of 100 users surveyed said that if their order delivery is guaranteed within 1–2 hours then they would be less likely to abandon the order at checkout.
• 22% of all our deliveries were delayed in 2019.

Challenges

• No ready and reliable data available to refer to.
• This project was completely new and was done for the first time by Walmart in Mexico market.
• Time was a major factor as the picker had to complete the picking process within the given time.
• Collaborating with multiple teams across multiple geographies and time-zones during the onset of a global pandemic.
• Covid pandemic

My Role

• Product designer
• Interaction design
• User experience design
• End to end journey maping
• Prototyping

Research

Our primary research was interviewing pickers to understand the pain points from their current picking routines and to understand the features that they want in the Bolt app.

Some of the key pain points that the Pickers wanted us to solve are:

• They wanted to know where the items are placed in the store so that it will be easy for them to traverse the store more efficiently and save time.
• They wanted to know the availability of products so that they do not spend time in looking for products which are not available at the store.
• Clear and legible product details and product images so that it will be easy to pick the right products.
• Item picking confirmation process should be quick.
• FFaster checkout process at the billing counter.

Secondary Research

As part of our secondary research I did extensive competitive analysis. I studied apps like Rappi, Corner shop and Instacart. My major challenge with these apps was that they were region specific and would not work in India. So I looked into shop-along and tutorial videos of these app in YouTube. I could learn more about the picker journey and I also collected screenshots of these apps. I created a detailed page to page comparison of these apps to understand the features and also to figure out how these apps solve various problems in the picker journey in their own way.

Ideation

Based on our research I finalized the features and solutions. Some of the key features are :

• Items listing on the app will be in the same order as the items placement in the store.
• Show clear item details with bigger font and bigger item images.
• Use the camera on the phone to scan the item bar-code and confirm the picking of items. This will make the picking process quicker and also will make sure the correct item is picked.
• Ability to pick substitute items for items which are unavailable at the store.
• Ability to call the customer at the end of picking journey — to confirm the items picked and the substitutions.
• In-app bar code generation for quicker checkout.
• Intelligent items substitution suggestions (proposed)

Wireframes

I used the wireframes to finalize the navigation, content and functionality and to give the developers and the stakeholders a walk-through of the app, this helped us to iterate and further fine-tune the features.

Final design

I designed the final UI adhering to the following principles -

• Clearly show the CTA's by giving them the right affordance
• Clear and simple navigation
• Consistent design language
• Consistent icon design

Prototyping

I created detailed prototypes using Adobe XD. I used these prototypes primarily to explain all the interactions and flow to our developers, to have discussions with stakeholders and to present the applications features and capabilities to our leadership teams from Mexico and USA.

Item picking flow

Substitution Item picking flow

Item unavailable flow

Motion design

I used animation to indicate positive feedback like Picking complete. I used After effects to create the animation and used bodymovin to export the animations as JSON files to handover to our developers.

Closing thoughts

This project was a great learning experience as I got the opportunity to work on a new initiative and also work with multiple teams across various geographies.

Some enhancement opportunities in the next phase of the project are :

• Enabling Picking and Delivery of items by the same resource.
• Intelligent items substitution suggestions based on our customers purchase pattern.
• Improve the successful picking rate.