Coppel: a tablet point of sale designed with the salespeople who use it

A salesperson’s day at a Coppel store starts with a short team meeting and the “grito Coppel”, then the electronic key and the cash float for their station. After that they arrange their department, help customers find a size or compare two TVs, and charge the sale on the tablet point of sale in their area. Coppel began putting these tablets on the store floor in October 2018, so fewer customers would queue at the central cash stations. A store manager told us the lines had got shorter, and that some customers who used to give up and leave now stayed.

The tablet had not caught up with the people using it. Exchanges, returns and some sales still had to go through the older stations, the “Micros”. When the system froze during a card payment there was no sale history to check whether the customer had been charged. Buttons were small, and the on-screen keyboard sat close to the cancel button, so a sale could be lost with one tap. There was no way to lock the screen, so salespeople opened another app when they stepped away. Quotes did not work, so payment plans were written on paper, and the address field was so short that salespeople abbreviated street names the delivery drivers then had to decode.

Many had learned the tablet by watching a coworker: one salesperson we met had six months on it and no training before starting. Coppel asked us to redesign its tablet point of sale around the people who use it every day, from new hires to salespeople with years on the floor.

Six stores, fifteen people

In November and December 2019 we visited six Coppel stores in Mexico City, Mérida and Monterrey and interviewed 12 salespeople and 3 managers at their stations. Each one walked us through real scenarios: a cash sale of clothing, a living-room set on credit with home delivery, a payment on a Coppel account. We also reviewed other point-of-sale apps and the research Coppel already had on waiting times at its cash stations.

Three people to design for

From those conversations came three personas and their journeys, as they were and as they could be: an experienced clothing saleswoman who learned the tablet from a coworker and makes several cash withdrawals a day; a young electronics salesman, confident with technology, who wrote payment plans on paper because quotes did not work; and a department manager who used the tablet mainly to approve sales with his fingerprint and wanted training so he could cover for his team.

A day that starts with your goals

The new design opens on “Mi Día” (My Day), where a salesperson sees how they are doing against their weekly and monthly goals. From there, every task they do at the tablet is in one place: sales, payments on account, phone top-ups, cash withdrawals and the end-of-day cash count, a screen lock, finding a customer by name, number or phone, finding a product by name or SKU, quotes, and carts a customer left pending on coppel.com. Cash withdrawals ask for 1,000, 500 and 200 peso notes first, the way salespeople already separate them.

Tested with the people who will use it

We reviewed the clickable prototype with Coppel’s team in four design drops and tested it in two rounds. In July 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, salespeople new to the tablet and experienced ones worked through 24 tasks on it, with masks and a sanitized station between sessions. The findings became 27 changes to the design, down to the labels: “Métricas” became “Metas” (goals). The new payment-on-account screen got the warmest response: one salesperson said it showed more than the current one, which helped him advise the customer.

Ready to build

We designed for the tablets’ Microsoft environment, following Universal Windows Platform patterns, and handed over the prototype in Figma, Sketch and Adobe XD with a style guide of every component and interaction examples that showed each one could be built.

In August 2020 Coppel received a point of sale designed from its own salespeople’s day and tested with them: the research report, three personas, current and future journeys, a clickable prototype covering sales, payments, cash handling and search, and the style guide its developers needed. The workarounds we found on the floor, the payment plans on paper and the other app opened to hide the screen, each became a feature of the new design.

Our part was the research and the design, from October 2019 to August 2020. Building the new app was outside our scope.