Retail DX

Empowering frontline store staff with data-informed insights.

🔍 Background & Challenge

Japan’s retail landscape faces complex pressures: an aging population, rising e-commerce competition, and labor shortages. Physical stores need to adapt their customer experience — but many struggle due to low data literacy and high staff turnover.

Flow’s own growth had stalled, hindered by:

• A vague value proposition
• Poor onboarding
• Confusing dashboards and visualizations

In-store staff often had low data literacy and lacked tools for cross-location knowledge sharing.

🎯 Project Goals

• Define a strategy based on the company vision, business goals, and user needs
• Empower frontline staff with clear, contextual insights
• Enable internal knowledge sharing between store locations
• Improve usability, clarity, and trust through better design language and IA

🧭 Process & Approach

We followed a Double Diamond approach, adapted to a fast-moving startup context:

1. Discover: UX Audit & Research

• Audited the current product’s structure, visualizations, and usability.
• Conducted 25+ interviews with store managers across 6 retail brands to understand tasks, pain points, and context
• Synthesized findings into themes: low data literacy, high turnover, poor knowledge sharing, and siloed communication

2. Define: Framing the Problem

• Mapped key flows (e.g., report review, store comparison)
• Identified friction points and areas for design leverage
• Aligned with leadership on UX priorities and success criteria

3. Develop: Design Exploration & Prototyping

• Reorganized dashboard structure around user goals
• Introduced modular layouts with clear visual hierarchy
• Designed new visualizations tailored to the audience’s data fluency
• Prototyped and tested new flows for onboarding and navigation

4. Deliver: Ongoing Implementation & Feedback Loops

• Worked with engineers to iterate weekly on implementation
• Built feedback loops with internal stakeholders

✨ Key Design Improvement

We redesigned key parts of the experience to make insights more accessible and actionable for retail staff.

• Re-prioritized content based on user behavior and feedback
• Added clear hierarchy and scannable layouts to reduce cognitive load
• Introduced new types of visualizations tailored to user tasks
• Structured headings and layout patterns to support findability

📈 Results (Ongoing)

The project is ongoing, with promising early feedback from internal stakeholders. We're continuing to refine flows and validate improvements with users in the field.

💬 Reflection

This has been a challenging but rewarding experience — driving product clarity from within a small team, in a market with low digital maturity. It’s sharpened my ability to design for low-literacy, high-turnover environments, and to advocate for user-centered design in ambiguous, high-stakes situations.