Designing the service, not just the screens
Two years in ALDI's experience design team, working on how customers get help, collect their shopping and use the app. Three projects from that time, with the thinking left in.
- Role
- Experience Design Specialist
- Year
- 2022–24
- Worked with
- Service designers, a UX/UI team and user research
- Where
- In-house
- What I did
- Service designCXUXWireframingSignage
The brief
Improve the customer experience and cut the cost of serving it. That line sat at the top of most of the team's work: sort an enquiry at the first point of contact, through the most efficient channel for that kind of problem.
This page covers three projects I was close to. Each one was a team effort, so I've been clear about where my part starts and stops. Names, logos and sensitive numbers are blanked out on the artefacts.
- 1
Service Centre
An online help space where customers can sort an enquiry themselves, without contacting anyone.
- 2
App shell
One navigation for a single app that could hold any mix of services, country by country.
- 3
In-store handover
Signage concepts that show customers where to go when they collect an order.
Service Centre: help people help themselves
It started with research. The service design team ran a 'top enquiries' exercise to find out why customers around the world contact customer service, then turned the answers into a list of fixes countries could put in place to cut the cost of contact.
Results from two of the countries that put the recommendations in place, tracking contacts before and after. Figures blanked for display.
Phase one of the answer was a Service Centre: one place online where customers could sort things out themselves.
Working from customer data and input from the business and the service designers, we put together a concept one-pager. It started from a simple question: how do you get from the account page we have to a service centre that actually works? What has to come first, and what makes it viable?
The concept one-pager: from the account area as it was to the Service Centre it needed to become, and what had to exist along the way.
With the requirements agreed, we wireframed every section: landing pages, logged in and logged out states, orders, preferences and FAQs.
The landing page leads with the question people actually arrive with. Search sits at the top, primed with the most common enquiries, and the account activity feed answers 'where is my order?' before anyone has to ask.
Logged in states for orders, preferences and FAQs, on desktop and mobile.
App shell: one navigation, any version of the app
ALDI planned to fold its separate services, called bundles, into a single app. Click and collect was one bundle; there would be more. The catch was that every country could launch with a different mix, and some with none at all.
So the navigation had to work with one bundle, every bundle, or anything in between. That was my main deliverable.
The full structure with every bundle switched on, and the information architecture underneath it.
The answer was a fixed frame with flexible middle. Home stays on the left and the help centre on the right in every version, because the help centre holds sub-menus that would otherwise get lost. The three slots between them are shortcuts each country can fill with whatever matters most to its customers. Account and settings stay put, minus anything that only exists because of a bundle.
Left: the empty shell, with no bundles. Right: a single bundle takes the centre slot, with its own shortcuts in the spaces either side if it's big enough to need them.
From the structure I drew low-fidelity wireframes. The international UX/UI team took them into high fidelity with the design system components, and the user researcher on the product tested them through Userlytics.
Low-fidelity wireframes handed to the UX/UI team.
Onboarding
Onboarding had the same problem in a different shape: collect everything any current or future service might need, without asking a one-bundle customer for things they'll never use. I mapped four journeys, from 'no access without registering' through to guest access from a bundle-specific campaign.
The four onboarding journeys, from registering up front to guest access from a campaign.
In-store handover: signs that keep the queue moving
For curbside pickup and click and collect, the team designed the service end to end. One piece was easy to overlook: what a customer sees when they walk in to collect. Where do they go? Who do they ask? How do they avoid ending up in the checkout queue?
My graphic design background meant I made the concept signage. Outside banners, entry signs with a QR sign-in, ceiling boards, floor stickers, packing bench signs and freezer adverts, all mocked up in store so stakeholders could see the journey rather than read about it.
Outside, then the entrance: tell people the service exists, then let them sign in with a QR code as they arrive.
Ceiling boards and floor stickers lead the way to the collection point without a member of staff.
The collection point, the leaflet that advertises the service, and a hi-vis vest so customers know who to ask.
The whole route on one page: every sign placed on an isometric store, from car park to packing bench.
The deck went to stakeholders to win global buy-in for the service.
What I took from it
ALDI is where I learned to design the service before the screen. The cheapest customer service enquiry is the one nobody needs to make, and a sign on the ceiling can do as much for that as a well-built page.
