Quenching a Serious Thirst for Data

A mobile app that empowers a large beverage company’s field sales agents with the right information at the right time.

Challenge: Provide field sales agents with data-driven insights specific to their beer brands’ performance.

Approach: Starting with the client’s existing sales app for wines, retailor the experience to the needs of beer specialists while keeping the branding and feel consistent across apps.

6 weeks

1 week onboarding & sprint kickoff
5 weeks agile sprints

10-person team

1 Designer
7 Developers
1 Business Analyst
1 Project Manager

Key Responsibilities

Interaction and visual design
Implementation review with developers

1. Understand Sales Data

(or, A Hellscape of Acronyms)

To ensure the app would meet the specialized needs of the client’s beer division, we first needed to learn to speak their language. This meant lots of up-front cram time with their sales team, understanding which terms were common parlance, how various data points factored into their sales strategy, and what we could simplify to ease the learning curve for new field agents.

We also needed a clear picture of how wine and beer distribution differ from each other, so that assumed similarities didn’t dampen the experience of using the Compass Beers app. We made sure to check our assumptions against the expectations of its future users.

2. Hit the Ground Running

After a week of on-site immersion at the client’s sales HQ, the project team moved straight into an agile development framework. I designed high-fidelity iPad and iPhone screen variants in Sketch, then pushed them to Zeplin for the dev team to immediately implement. New interaction patterns were roughed out and then refined; more common interactions took inspiration from those in the Wine app, with major structural adjustments to better suit the use cases for the Beer version.

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