|
|
Project Overview
Retailers have been using paper labels to display price and product information for years. However, retailers now recognise the benefits of displaying this information digitally using electronic shelf labels (ESLs). Displaying accurate and impactful price, product and marketing messages in the store, with the ability to update this content remotely in real-time, enhances both the consumer experience and the sales and margins of retailers using Displaydata ESLs. Displaydata’s Dynamic Solution helps eliminate many of the issues retailers face, including inconsistent pricing across channels, and helps bring the internet into the store with peer reviews and price comparisons displayed on ESLs.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Displaydata is a venture-backed private company established in 2000. Displaydata is the number one provider of dynamic digital display solutions incorporating fully graphic fully graphic electronic shelf labels (ESLs). Displaydata combines strategic vision and commercial focus with world-class scientific, engineering and manufacturing expertise.
Compsoft have designed and developed web-based applications since 2003. Having previously engaged with Compsoft on a mobile project, Displaydata selected Compsoft’s market-leading UX and UI design expertise for their Dynamic Central software solution. Compsoft combine stunning interface design with cutting edge development to deliver the best possible app for each customer. Our thirty-strong team love nothing more than to apply our passion, creativity, skill and experience to each client’s individual requirement.
Project Brief
Displaydata’s Dynamic Solution features fully graphic, high resolution electronic shelf labels (ESLs) connected via two-way wireless communicators, all controlled by an easy-to-use software suite.
Displaydata’s development team had engineered highly sophisticated software that enabled the creation and publishing of images to ESLs but needed to deliver a high quality, simple to use interface for management of the solution. The brief to Compsoft was to develop two new elements of Displaydata’s Dynamic Solution - Dynamic Console and Dynamic Create.
Dynamic Console is an intuitive web-based management tool for the simple configuration and centralised management of the Dynamic Solution across a retailer’s estate. Compsoft’s challenge was to take the highly complex workflow which defined how labels were grouped, assigned and mapped onto the stores’ Dynamic Solution, and present it in a way that a non-technical user could easily understand. It was also important that anyone using Dynamic Console would require minimal training.
Dynamic Create enables the creation and editing of ESL designs, allowing the system’s central administrator to create fully graphic label designs that support any combination of text, images, logos, barcodes and QR codes, with ‘drag and drop’ simplicity.
Compsoft were tasked with making the label design process as easy and intuitive as possible, whilst incorporating substantial flexibility. It was important that users from a variety of retail backgrounds could start using the system without in-depth training, allowing them to get up to speed quickly.
Project Need
ESLs have been around for many years but, until Displaydata’s Dynamic Solution, no single solution had managed to combine the elements of image creation and layout, and management and system status reporting, into a fully cohesive, centrally managed web-based solution. The solution is powerful and scalable: 65,000 ESLs can be controlled by a single communicator, sufficient to cover a store the size of a football pitch, and millions of ESLs can be updated from a central point within seconds.
The key to Displaydata’s Dynamic Solution is simplicity. The solution is simple to navigate around, and through the use of a simple-to-use template design interface, retailers can re-create existing paper label designs digitally. What is displayed on a label in-store can greatly increase the chance of a sale. With Displaydata’s fully graphic ESLs, retailers can create eye-catching designs that don’t just replicate their existing paper labels, but can also include images, QR codes, customer reviews, price comparisons – all with the ability to update in real-time.
The solution significantly cuts down the time taken for retailers to implement price changes and promotions in-store which previously could have taken days or even weeks, meaning that retailers were not benefiting from the promotion during that time. This automation not only frees up store staff to better serve customers, but greatly enhances the consumer’s in-store experience, and ultimately drives increases in sales.
Furthermore the centralised management of the retailer’s enterprise ensures that price compliance is no longer a problem.
User Experience
The technical details of how designs are displayed on ESLs are highly complex and it was vital that this complexity was hidden from the user, without limiting what they could achieve. Therefore Compsoft worked closely with Displaydata to understand what their system did, how this benefitted the user, and to understand Displaydata’s vision for customer implementation. The focus was then shifted to the user: who are they, and what do they need to achieve?
The resultant solution provides an intuitive, straightforward workflow and maps this onto the more complex underlying architecture.
The user is introduced to Dynamic Create via inviting large green ‘Start’ buttons. A simple wizard is displayed for the more complex ‘data mapping’ steps, after which the user is taken into a familiar drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor, consisting of three vertically-aligned panels:
The user can drag data objects (price, description etc.) from the left-hand panel onto the central canvas, and then size/position them using standard interactions. The right-hand panel enables the editing of more detailed properties like line-weight and font. Once a label is saved, it can be managed from the Home screen. The user can also set up simple ‘If statements’, for example: If Time is after 18:00, show Stock-Check label design.
Dynamic Console provides an at-a-glance dashboard for a user to understand the status of their ESL estate. Identifying ESL update issues and drilling down to their cause is made easy using visual health indicators and comprehensive filter controls.
Project Marketing
Displaydata targets global retailers, with a particular focus on Tier One retailers. These customers use Displaydata’s Enterprise Software to manage dynamic pricing and product information changes including price comparisons and peer reviews, as well as product provenance and product information.
One of the key messages to retail prospects is that implementing Displaydata’s solution not only frees up store staff to better serve customers, but greatly enhances the consumer’s in-store experience, and ultimately drives increases in sales and margins.
Displaydata promotes the Dynamic Solution to retailers through a series of marketing activities including:
• Creation of regular, engaging content to educate the market on the benefits of the solution, including articles and blogs
• Attendance at key retail events
• Emarketing and direct marketing campaigns
• PR and Social media
• Partner events and co-marketing activities
Project Privacy
Each user logs in to the application with their individual username and password, which are encrypted for transmission to the server using HTTPS and authenticated using standard HTTP authorisation. Permission based access, implemented as per the .NET framework standard, ensures each user has access to only those system functions to which they are entitled - roles include Template Editor, Data Publisher, Client User Manager, Client Administrator and Client Viewer. Administrators can add users, remove user access, or change access permissions at any time.
The software is installed separately on each customer’s server infrastructure, and all data transmitted between servers is also secured using HTTPS.
Business Operations
These apps help businesses across a range of business operations activities, from managing personnel, project management and customised apps for specific business processes and tasks, we're looking for apps that make it easier for businesses to run both day to day operations and improve their business functionality and efficiency.
More Details