Timeline
Sept 2017 — Oct 2019
My role
Collaborating with another designer on the project, I co-led:
User research
Prototyping and testing
Interaction and visual design
Workshop facilitation
Sales team training
Training the client’s design team taking over th project
Platform
Android and iOS
Web
Challenge
Affected by many years of on-trade sales decline and fierce industry competition, how could Carlsberg bring new and unprecedented value to their client relationship?
Approach
Working with a rapid prototyping and iterative process helped us move quickly from a validated proposition to a pilot, to an MVP and finally a scaled product in 3 markets in less than two years.
We were able to quickly validate a proposition that would not only bring value to outlet managers and their staff but also help Carlsberg strengthen their relationship with these customers for the years to come.
Solution
We created Skillable, a training service designed for hospitality staff and their unique needs. Skillable is a complete training solution that includes an extended library of lessons and a content creation platform (the App Manager) for managers to create content that is unique to their business.
Skillable is available exclusively to Carlsberg customers and was initially released in Denmark, Switzerland and the UK. It is now available in 8+ markets.
Discovery
The project kicked-off with a 6 weeks discovery phase, travelling to Switzerland, Hong Kong and Denmark to interview Carlsberg customers, global senior stakeholders and market leads.
Learning Goals
Understand what problems do Carlsberg customers face when running their business
Identify opportunities for Carlsberg to support customers better
Understand the current state of customer relationships in each market
Initial high-level sketches testing during the discovery phase
Outcome
We quickly identified staff training as an expensive and time-consuming effort for hospitality managers. Seasonal hires and negative perception of the job in some markets make it difficult to retain staff.
Defining the Proposition
Informed by insights gathered in the previous round of research, we created four additional concept sketches to test with outlet managers.
Learning Goals
Who are our primary users? (manager or staff)
What would help managers grow their business?
Concepts
A training platform for managers to up-skill themselves
A skill diagnosis tool that managers can use to identify their staff’s training needs
A quiz and challenges platform for that staff can use to grow their skills daily
A platform for hospitality managers to get support and advice from other managers
Ideas that tested best are the ones that help managers understand their staff needs and support them in training staff better.
Sketch ideas tested with outlet managers
Testing Low-Fidelity Prototypes
In the next sprint, we tested two clickable prototypes to understand how an app could support managers in training their staff better.
Prototype 1 (left):
Concept: an app that checks a manager’s knowledge by sending daily quizzes and shares outlet results at the end of the week.
Results: Managers we excited about getting the opportunity to check their and their staff’s knowledge with quizzes and getting tips but weren’t really interesting in getting their outlet compared to others.
Prototype 2 (right):
Concept: a library of training content available to outlet managers who could use pick any lessons to create to train their staff.
Results: managers were interested in using training content from a reliable source but would also want to create their own content to fully train their staff.
Value proposition
A training service that grows the capabilities of staff through 2 to 5 minutes micro-lessons and empowers managers to create their own training content.
Executing the Proposition
We held 2 workshops with staff and managers in Zurich and Copenhagen. We wanted to understand:
What the most (and least) important needs for a learning tool are and what features to prioritise for a pilot release - limited to 5.
What learning methods are most valuable and useful to staff, in their environment
What it takes to create training content that is useful and engaging to this audience
Features Prioritised:
Choosing training content that’s most relevant to them and their outlet
Short and informative training content
Testing their knowledge
Ability to track progress
Daily advice on how to do their job better
The Pilot
We worked closely with two outlets in Switzerland to launch our pilot. We encouraged managers to invite their staff to use the app and we visited regularly to gather feedback from managers and staff.
Learning Goals
How often would staff and managers use the app for training?
How could the app experience be improved?
How could the training content be improved?
What impact would the app have on staff’s abilities and performance?
Outcome
Lessons which helped staff answer guest questions confidently were highly valued
The pilot was most useful to customers with a high turnover of young staff or who employ temporary staff
English content was a barrier to staff whose first language isn’t English
The pilot, then called SkillServe, launched in two outlets in Switzerland
App Manager
Testing and refining content with our pilot users helped us figure out the right format and tone of voice for our audience. That meant that the basic CMS we had built to support our early content creation needs had to be improved in order to support the launch of our MVP to a large number of outlets.
From the start, we wanted the App Manager to be very visual and for content to be able to preview content exactly how it would look when published to staff on the app.
Challenge
Make content creation intuitive and highly visual
Abstract complexity of the content hierarchy
Provide the right information at the right time (content status…)
Design flows for users with different permission needs
Outcome
An intuitive and visual experience, the App Manager is the perfect companion to Skillable.
The platform supports both managers who aren’t interested in spending time making things “look good” but still want their lessons to look professional and other users who are more adventurous and want to play with colours and images.
Admins can create training content in different formats: either a course containing multiple lessons on the same topic or single lessons. The App Manager is a flexible platform: lessons within courses can be re-ordered after they have been created.
The App Manager has a clean and simple interface - making it intuitive to create training content
Card Templates
The card tool is simple to use and highly visual. Creating a lesson starts with a card template with three elements: a title, a body text and an image. Title and body text are editable directly on the card and an image can be drag and dropped in the image field.
Each of these elements is optional and can be removed by clicking the corresponding delete button on the right.
There can only be one of each item on each card and three items overall: when it comes to training content, we learned that staff usually learn better from concise lessons that are more visual than wordy.
Managing Cards
An item that has been removed from the card template can be re-added by using the bottom item menu. Only items that aren’t already placed on the card can be added.
Cards within a lesson can be re-ordered once they have been saved
Sign Up Flow
Users who have been added to the database sign up by entering their phone number and receive a one-time verification code that is valid for 15 minutes.
Onboarding Flows
The onboarding process for all users had so far been handled by the product team. As we aimed to reach our users’ adoption goals, we needed to create onboarding flows so that sales managers could invite outlets and their manager.
Inviting Outlets to Skillable
We shadowed sales managers on their typical day to understand the shape of their relationship to outlet managers. We learned that we could reach our adoption targets by giving sales managers the tools to introduce Skillable to their customers and to sign them up instantly, with the manager seated next to them.
Manager Onboarding
Once a manager has been invited to Skillable by their sales manager, they can sign up to Skillable with their phone number. The onboarding flow requires the manager to:
Confirm the outlet name
Select courses for their staff from the Skillable library of content
Select product lessons based on the Carlsberg product they sell in their outlet
Inviting Staff to Skillable
Managers can autonomously invite their staff join Skillable, either directly from their contact list or by entering details manually.
Driving Higher Staff Engagement
Shifting focus from adoption to the quality of engagement with Skillable, we started looking into our data to understand how active our outlet managers and staff had been on the app and found out that:
77% of outlets had managers signed in
Only 32% of managers had added any staff
We ran user interviews with outlet managers to understand why managers weren’t actively using Skillable to train their staff.
Engagement discovery goals
Understand why managers aren’t inviting their staff to Skillable
Understand why staff who get invited do not sign up at least once
Research insights
We learned from managers that not having access to staff’s training progress within the app was a deal-breaker. Seeing progress would help them understand what staff had achieved within the app and be a good starting point for conversations.
Tracking Staff Progress
Based on user testing insights, we were able to refine our understanding of a progress tracking feature that helps and inform managers on courses and lessons completed by their staff.