Ambassador

Background

We were given the challenge of improving the Constellation Brands Ambassador App. It’s key feature was a product locator for Constellation Brands products. Ambassador is the only internal facing app that connects the beer, wine, and spirits segments of the company. It’s a stripped down version of an internal sales app called, “Compass”, which is only available to the sales employees of Constellation Brands. While Ambassador's intended use case was to encourage employees across the company to consume and share products more, when the app was released, it was most intuitive for sales employees who were already familiar with Compass.

Understanding Client Needs

Ambassador creators envisioned a platform that would encourage employees to buy and consume products in segments outside of their own, becoming “Brand Ambassadors”.
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Client Goals:

Optimization

Employees = Consumers

Opportunities for Ambassador (client suggestions)

Our team wanted to know:
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Our Initial Findings

From our domain research, it was important for us to understand how other alcohol companies were engaging their own employees. We discovered that many other alcohol companies offer internal-facing apps to engage their employees.
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Some competitors we looked at included:

Beer:

Wine:

Spirits:

Since we did not have access to the internal-facing apps of our competitors, we researched into how other product locator type apps were engaging their users.
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We analyzed:

3 Primary Strengths:

These strengths inspired ideas for how we could improve the experience for Ambassador.

Understanding Our Users

At this point, we felt pretty clear on Ambassador’s potential. However, we wanted to hear from employees themselves.
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We talked to 4 employees and 2 main user groups emerged:
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We based our user personas on these 2 main groups. These personas helped us organize and prioritize our target user's needs.
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Consumer facing user persona:

Sales user persona:

The Problem

To get to the heart of Eileen and Jeff’s experiences, we developed our problem statement:

We developed 3 main design principles to guide us through the process:

Goals for Moving into Ideation

We looked to our problem statement to establish themes around 3 main areas to explore:

Concepting

From the 3 main areas we identified through our problem statement, we started developing concepts.

We created 7 main concepts that we tested with 4 Constellation Brands employees.
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Identify Market Opportunities

Be Educated on CBI Products

Feel Connected to CBI

After testing, we discovered 1 main reoccurring theme:

Employees were not interested in abstract or typical “fun” concepts that required multiple levels of interpretation. They were interested in concepts that would improve them professionally, or help them success in their job at Constellation.

Focusing In

From there, we narrowed down to 4 main concepts to prototype:

The Product

We tested 7 users in total, with 4 being CBI employees.
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(Please watch video walkthrough in 1080p)
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User Feedback:

Navigation

It was intuitive to search by product, not intuitive on how information is filtered.

Education

Education should be universal and kept simple so all users can understand clearly.

Community

Employees don’t want to build new social networks. They want to build relationships with the company.

Recommendations

Reduce Noise

Moving forward, card sorting and content audit would help us organize filters, clarify labels, and prioritize information in a more intuitive way for CBI employees.

Make Features Consistent Throughout App

The search bar and bookmark features tested well, but were not implemented across the app. Doing so would enable users to to navigate directly to information they are interested in.

Incorporate Onboarding

Without onboarding, our users had some difficulty understanding bottom navigation labels and general app orientation. Onboarding would clarify the app’s features and overall organization.

Next Steps

As our client was handing over our prototype to the UI team, we provided annotated wireframes along with our package of deliverables help guide them in the process.