Designing a Wallpaper Display System for an Effective Product Selection : A Collaboration with Midbec Wallpapers
Abstract: We are heading into a world that is becoming more and more digital. In the future markets, customers will demand that some sort of technical support is available when they make purchases. This put a big responsibility on companies that have to satisfy that need. The wallpaper industry has not incorporated many efficient support tools to facilitate the product selection at Swedish retailers. This results in that customers experience many issues when they search for new wallpapers. Through a needfinding process, where customers were observed at retailers, eight primary customer needs could be established in the project. These were ranked after their relative importance. The results showed that the most important needs to satisfy was to give customer’s inspiration and help them visualize wallpapers in environments. In two workshops, around 100 ideas on how a system that could satisfy these needs was generated in a number of brainstorming sessions. These ideas were then culled with various evaluation methods such as rating matrixes, inventory methods and by clustering the ideas. At the end of the evaluation process, four concepts remained with different levels of technical demands and implementation requirements. The decision of which concept that was going to be further developed was then made by Midbec. The final system is a service that allows customer to visualize chosen wallpapers in a digital environment. The system contains a screen with a connected hand scanner that will be integrated in Midbec’s store interior and QR-barcodes that is applied to each wallpaper. When a barcode is decoded, either with the scanner or with a smartphone, the user connects to Midbec’s newly developed online wallpaper tool where the wallpaper can be seen in different environments. The benchmarking showed that no studies of effective wallpaper displays has been made. Several areas where new systems can be implemented to support customers and promote wallpapers more effectively was found throughout the process. This means that there are many possibilities to develop and implement new designs in the industry. As a conclusion, this project showed that a needfinding process should focus on incorporating the user to the highest possible level to ensure that reliable data is collected. Another conclusion is that customers experience many different issues in today’s wallpaper selection process. Again, this shows that there is potential to develop systems that can improve today’s wallpaper industry.
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