Client
Humanic
Store Refit
Self service shoe wall
Humanic are a large footwear retailer across mainland Europe, traditionally their stores have been large spaces in shopping malls, where all sizes available were on display. As a customer you could simply pick up your size, and be on your way.
In 2011, they wanted to change this, and open new, smaller stores across Europe. But with a smaller store, putting all sizes on display just isn't feasible.
Being served? The original method of leaving customers to find their size, allows for the customer to help themselves and for Humanic to hire less floor staff.
Without this, unless something changed, staff would have to take size requests from each customer - go to the storeroom to find the size - and bring them back to a customer to try on.
Bringing back the self service. To bring back the self service, an automated system was setup. Customers can pick a shoe off the shelf and scan the barcode on one of the many readers around the store.
On the screen of the scanner, they are displayed the sizes that are available, and the user can select the size(s) they want to try, along with scanning more shoes.
Confirming this gives the user a number for their order, which the people in the store go to work collecting, and then the order simply arrives on the conveyer to collect, try and put back those they don't need.
The interactive shoe-wall is used to entertain users while they wait for their shoes to try on, in contrast to traditional number calling systems, and to make it as eye-catching as possible to make customers aware of where they needed to go to collect the shoes they wanted to try.
Completely seamless service
The scanner that Humanic chose to use updates a .txt file whenever another request is placed.
We used this to control dynamic animations that would introduce a bird to the scene, flying around in the distance with the customers number, so they knew it had been placed.
We setup for a change in the file to be created as the request was put in the lift to the conveyer belt. This triggered the bird to drop the box into the row, at the base of the screen, so the customer knew there shoes were about to arrive. This then animated along to inform the user of where they were in the queue.
Pigs might fly. To keep things fresh, birds would land on trees occasionally, flutter and then fly off again.
There were a series of 5 backgrounds, each designed individually to both keep the wall looking different, and simultaneously avoid screen burn-in from occurring. And occasional easter eggs, such as your box being delivered by a pig rather than a bird.
My role
My role included producing some of the 'in flight' animations for the birds. And overseeing the rest of these.
Producing the first prototype of continually consuming the txt file - along with generating and progressing the birds and boxes to different states as required to inform the customer of the state of their request.
Following this I then co-built the final production version, along with one other developer.