ia strategy report - kidsmallusa

KidsMall USA | Information Architecture Strategy Report | December 2009

KidsMall USA Create. Share. Learn. Grow.

Strategy Report

Dan Marano Kerry Kao Suzy Salib


PROBLEM

An average mall can generate $300M in annual sales, with the biggest malls reaching over $1B in annual sales. But the current recession has bankrupted more than 1 in 10 of the 1100+ enclosed malls across the country, and more than 10 percent of storefronts in US malls are vacant. Retail sales have declined three percent over the last 12 months, but revenue for mall retailers has declined twice as much, down nearly seven percent.

The scale of the revenue loss underscores the need to find new, innovative retail concepts to lure customers back to the mall, and this strategy report outlines a plan a new retail concept to do just that – KidsMallUSA. KidsMallUSA will use “advanced information systems, logistics, and retail technologies to offer an exclusive, engaging and rewarding experiences that will bring more and better customers to the mall.”

For Consumers. The ability to make, not just buy, is important. Handcrafts are more popular than ever, with 42 million American households, or 37 percent, saying they gave handmade items as gifts in the last year. Indeed, Etsy is the leading online marketplace for handmade crafts, and in a single month at the end of 2008 it sold $10.8 million in handmade goods, featuring 135,000 sellers and 1.1 million new items on its site. The popularity of sites like Etsy is in part motivated by the recession and the need to save money—and in part by consumers’ desire to make unique and special handmade gifts, no matter what the circumstances.

Users

Kids & Parents

Content

Create / Make Invite / Share Buy / Sell Learn / Grow

Context

Retailers & Customers

CONTEXT For Retailers. Toys and crafts are big business, even in a downturn. Toys were a $21.4 billion industry in 2008, experiencing no decline in sales compared to the previous 12 months despite the recession. Indeed, toys represent the single largest expenditure parents make on children ages 0-14, ahead of both clothes and video games. Similarly, the sale of handcrafts earned $5.9 billion last year. In fact, Michael’s, the leading craft retailer in the country, posted revenues of $3.8 billion in 2008 alone, a slight increase over the previous year’s revenues.

Fig. 1: The content, context and users relationships of KidsMall USA


For Both. Combining the in-store and online experiences makes for superior customer engagement. Michael’s is a market leader because it combines free in-store workshops for customers that use materials and supplies sold in its stores with a new web site—“Michael’s: Where Creativity Happens.” The site offers workshop schedules, coupons, crafting tips, project plans, and traditional e-commerce options. Its highly integrated online and offline retail experience rewards both customers and retailer alike.

CONTENT

KidsMall will offer just this type of highly integrated retail experience, combining a unique, real-world store experience in a mall setting with an innovative online marketplace that will enable kids to (see Fig. 2):

Make & Create. Kids can make toys and handcrafted items in the mall store using a wide selection of in-store crafting supplies. Staff will also lead in-store workshops and demonstrations , encouraging kids’ creativity and expanding their ability to use the store’s wide variety of craft and toy-making supplies.

Share & Invite. Kids can upload digital images of the toys and crafts they’ve made to the online marketplace. Then they can share their creativity by using the in-store kiosks to invite their friends, family, and social networks to view and purchase their creations online, either in the store or online.

Buy & Sell. Friends, family, and other kids can buy the handmade toys and crafts ,using a smART cards at in-store kiosks. Kids can keep the profits from the sale of their toys and crafts, or use the proceeds as a fundraising opportunity for their favorite cause. Using an inter-mall national delivery system, gift items can be shipped for pickup by friends and family members at other malls across the United States.

Learn & Grow. Kids can volunteer to sell crafts and toys in the store, learning important math and social skills while processing smART card (see Fig. 5) transactions at in-store kiosks. As they practice their entrepreneurial skills and engage their friends and family in the process, their confidence and sense of community will grow along the way.

Learn & Grow

Buy & Sell

Share & Invite

Make & Create

Fig. 2: The content of KidsMall USA


For kids, a big draw of KidsMall USA is the chance to play play grown-up and sell stuff, their own and a selection of cool arts and craft supplies. They also like the idea of going to a fun workshop and learning how to make something new instead of being dragged around the mall by their parents.

GOALS

Giving kids a venue to create and learn about the juncture of art and commerce to share their creations and the creative spirit while learning key concepts of information literacy and basic organization and math principles from keeping shop and working the register at the KidsMall store.

Getting parents and kids to the mall who otherwise tend not to shop there for a variety of reasons. Understanding those reasons, and offering a space attractive enough activities to get these would-be customers to come to the mall.

USERS

KidsMall USA users are kids and parents looking for creative outlets and educational opportunities, especially during the long winter months. They do not frequent the mall more often because of the lack of kid-friendly and age-appropriate activities for kids. But, given the right creative and educational opportunity in a pleasant and engaging atmosphere, they would definitely go to the mall more often.

For parents, a big draw of KidsMall USA is that it’s a place where their kids can do more than just shop and consume, but learn and grow. They are particularly eager for their kids to have an entrepreneurial experience, where the kids can practice selling their creations. Parents are willing to pay a membership/subscription fee for this, plus course/workshop fees, much in the same way they do at children’s museums, if they see the activity as educational and instructional. Because parents are so pressed for time, drop-in workshops are especially appealing, as is the ability to have kids’ creations shipped as gifts to friends and family across the country with the unique RFID tracking system (one less trip to the post office, after all!). Parents are also fairly fluent with online scheduling, photo-sharing, social networking, and ecommerce sites, and see the value in having KidsMall USA take advantage of their existing contacts and address books to alert friends and family about in-store birthday parties, sign up for in-store workshops, or upload photos of kids creations at home and invite friends and family to view and purchase them.


Offering kids a creative, structured play and workshop space so that parents can feel confident leaving there kids there for an hour or two while they go off to shop for themselves. Providing parents with a valuable activity center where they can host parties and play dates that involve learning and creative time. Many parents don’t have the inclination to undertake messy or complicated art projects at home, and KidsMall would provide a dedicated venue and workshops to get messy and make things.

Teaching kids about computer and information literacy by operating the register and also learning to photograph and tag their creations online. Tagging and search skills are increasingly important for overall media literacy, and showing kids how to tag and describe their creations so that they and others can find them easily could be a real benefit to kids that parents would highly value.

Showing parents that the mall can be a place about more than ‘shameless commerce’; instead, it can be a place where they grow their kids’ creativity, confidence, and entrepreneurial skills.

PRIMARY RESEARCH

Interview We conducted interviews with seven parents and two kids to learn about their interests, habits, and relationship to shopping, the mall, and creative pursuits. These interviews formed the basis for our two personas, and provided much insight into what people both valued and missed from the typical mall experience. Most importantly they directed our models and research towards features, events, and items that would be most valued in both the physical and online components of KidsMall USA.

Survey We also conducted a five-question guerilla marketing survey among 42 parents attending the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum’s two-day Science Workshop Weekend. The event featured a wide range of experimental and craft-making workshops led by Hands-On Museum staff, similar to the workshops we propose for KidsMall USA. 34 of the people surveyed said that they did not regularly visit the mall, and 31 said they visited the mall fewer than three to four times per year, with 14 claiming to visit no more than once or twice per year. When asked if the KidsMall USA concept, with craft-making workshops and the chance for handle electronic transactions with a smART card and in-store kiosk would be enough to bring them to the mall, 25 said ‘yes,’ 11 said ‘maybe,’ and only six people said no.


Fig.3: Card sort results revealed the need for faceted search

“If my kids could go to the mall and learn how to make things, or have some kind of educational experience while I shopped? ….Absolutely, yes I’d go more often.”

– Sandra, mother of two girls, ages 4 and 7

“We’d go to the mall more if there were more kid-friendly things to do there…as it is, I try to run in and out, to minimize how long I have to entertain them while we’re there.”

– Elizabeth, mother of two boys, ages 6 and 7

Card Sort We used an open-ended card sort consisting of 76 color photos, culling images from several kids and craft websites, including Instructables, Michael’s and Kaboose.

Six adults and two kids performed the card sort—with the major finding being that the KidsMall USA online platform needs to have a robust faceted search feature that allows users to search by a wide variety of categories. No two people performed the card sort the same way, and the relevant categories varied—with everything from materials, content, occasion, age appropriateness, project duration, and even ‘messiness factor’ as desired search terms.


PERSONA

Based on the quantitative and qualitative research via in-depth interviews, we created the following personas:

Helena

Characteristics: Love to play grown-up Miss independent Like to be boss Social director

Go to KidsMallUSA only if: Friends Birthdays Fairy princesses

Jane

Characteristics: Anti-consumerism Anti-chain stores Supports local businesses

Support KidsMallUSA only if: Charity Socializing Learning

SECONDARY RESEARCH

Kid-focused Enterprises While KidsMall USA offers a unique retail concept, we looked at other examples of kid-focused enterprises from both the online and brick-and-mortar worlds to compare their structure and organization to our ideas for KidsMall USA.

Overall, we found two primary things that confirmed both our intuition and our primary research findings:

a) Faceted search is crucial for both e-commerce and online marketplaces such as the one for KidsMall USA; both Etsy and Instructables dot com provided good examples of industry leaders with strong faceted search; and

b) The most successful kid-focused sites complemented, reinforced, and extended unique in-store experiences, while still keeping the site simple enough for kids to navigate; these included sites for San Francisco’s Exploratorium, Kidzania, the Ann Arbor Arts Center, Legoland, and others.


OVERVIEW | In-store Transactions | part I

When a customer approaches the register, they are greeted by our kid at the register, who is aided by an older KidsMall mentor or manager. The customer they might be carrying a store item for purchase, or have something on order, stored in an RFID tagged box. The simple beauty of the KidsMall register is that it has two identical touch-screen monitor stations that are back to back . The customer and the salesperson at the register see the same screen, and both have to verify the amount being charged, and the items scanned. Each station has a card swipe, so that the salesperson can “clock in” and have all of their transactions recorded and accounted for. The customer facing side reads either the customer’s KidsMall smART card, or a credit card. Both cards call up any items that have been ordered online via the ecommerce site, where notification has been sent to the customer to come in and pick-up their goods. Once the customer has swiped their card, both screens will ask if the customer wishes to purchase a new item or pick-up an item that is on hold. New items are simply read by the RFID scanner that is part of the salesperson’s register station. Items on hold will require the sales person and their mentor/manager to look back storage, which is behind the register station. The store room consists of open metal shelving that is labeled by large letters and numbers for every available 1’ space for the KidsMall RFID boxes. All boxes are scanned

when they arrive at the store, either by a store manager, or with the help of volunteer KidsMall kids, earning smART bucks. A holding area in the store room, has RFID boxes that have been delivered but yet to be shelved. An RFID hand scanner is used to log in boxes and to input the letter and number of an open shelf space. As soon as this information enters the system, an email notice is generated to inform the customer that their purchase is now waiting for their pick-up. They have 2 weeks to pick-up any ordered item. They are not billed until they pick up at the register, and if they cannot make it in by 2 weeks, they get an email notification to either pay to continue to hold the item, or it will become active on the website and be available for purchase. Once all items have been scanned at the register station, they will show up on both screens, where salesperson and customer can see the items and the addition of the sub-total in large format numbers on the right of the screen. Once both parties agree that the subtotal is correct, and verify it, the printed receipt is generated, charges go through, and the website inventory is updated. See Fig. 4 for the interaction flow map for in-store transactions.


Fig. 4: Interaction flow map for in-store transactions


OVERVIEW| In-store Transactions | PART II

The KidsMall Kiosk The KidsMall kiosks are separate from the register and are located in the store. They re identical to the register stations, but with only a single screen and card swipe. They each have two webcams attached, and a pedestal that can serve both as a platform to photograph and log in new works, or as an additional register for a manager to look up or make an in-store sale if things get busy. One of the two Kiosks also contains the thermal card printer, so that new and replacement smART cards/ID badges can be generated talking a new picture if need be. Swiping your smART card at a kiosk, calls up your own account, and then prompts the user to see if they wish to input a new creation, or browse their account. Register The Register/scanning/checkout with a mirror screen for customer and kid a the register. The in-store kid/customer transaction is a critical component of the KidsMall experience. Standing at the register, and “manning the till” has been identified by all the interviewed kids and parents as one of the most attractive features of KidsMall. The in-store transaction at the register marks the juncture of art and commerce. Kids get to role play as a business proprietor while learning key life concepts about spending, trust and math. Although the KidsMall seller completes the real transaction with a customer, cash is never exchanged or needs to be managed. Payment and purchase must either

be with a KidsMall Smart ID card, that can hold credit, like a gift card, or if a parent is making a purchase, a Visa/MasterCard can be swiped in place of the KidsMall smART Card.

smART card With the KidsMall smART card, kids can earn smART bucks, for working at the register or helping with workshops, that are then credited to their cards. Additionally, parents and relatives can login to the KidsMall site and use their own credit or debit cards to gift money onto a KidsMall account, much like one would give a pre-paid gift card.

The smART card can then be used to make purchases of supplies and artwork at the KidsMall store, or at participating mall stores as well, all of which donate 5% of sales to the area KidsMall charity.

Fig. 5: smART card for in-store transactions


The smART card also functions as an ID card, with both the child’s picture on it and their personal and account history stored in the card’s chip.

The smART cards are laminated, and printed right from the in store kiosk, which has a thermal card printer that the KidsMall manager can use to print up new or replacement blank KidsMall smART cards. The smART card is linked to the individual child’s online Avatar and account. It is swiped when a child is either staffing the register, to provide a full accounting and work history of every KidsMall member. At the kiosk, swiping your card instantly calls up your account so that you can upload images of new work, or access any aspect of your profile as you would from home

SITE ARCHITECTURE | Overview The global navigation of KidsMall USA is composed of five primary categories: Home, Calendar, Workshop, My Avatar and Gallery.

To keep it simple for kids and prevent them from getting lost as they navigate through the five main sections, the site is built with a flat hierarchy and no sub-menu system. It will also use step by-step Ajax-based interactions to keep users on the same as they browse and search the site for their favorite toys and crafts or supplies.

KidsMall USA is heavy on visual elements. Image blocks and icons attract kids’ attention more than standard text-based links. See Fig. 6 for the wireframe for the KidsMallUSA homepage.


Fig. 6, wireframe for the KidsMallUSA homepage.

KidsMall USA | Information Architecture Strategy Report | December 2009 Fig. 7. , a more hi-fi wireframe for the KidsMallUSA homepage.


Event Scheduling

Fig. 8 illustrates the interaction flow that the user will go through to schedule in-store selling/displaying, birthday party or event.

After choosing the date and time by dragging an animal footprint on the calendar, the user will be prompted to choose one of the three activities stated above. If the in-store selling/displaying is chosen, a sequence of Ajax-based window will pop up to inquire information about item name, pictures, description, tags, and if the user want to sell it on KidsMall Online. If all goes well, a window will pop up for the user to invite their friends or family through popular social networking website, such as Facebook, Twitter, or through email. See Fig. 9 for a detailed interaction flow map for event scheduling and social networking and see Fig. 10 for the wireframe for event scheduling.

Fig. 8: Interaction Flow for Calendar & Event Scheduling


Fig. 9. detailed interaction flow map for event scheduling and social networking


Fig. 10. the wireframe for event scheduling


WIREFRAME | My Avatar #

‘My Avatar’ is the page composed of the social networking aspect of the site and also serves as a portfolio for young entrepreneurs to build up their self image and confidence.

A direct link of this profile page is presented as a mail icon and can be sent out to people who do not have an account on KidsMall USA. The user is able to post current status, from which the keywords such as paperboard, beads, ink, i.e., supplies will be extracted as links that connects to the KidsMall Online.

In addition, in-store selling/displaying, birthday party, event and workshop will be shown in a personal calendar here. The idea of building an avatar per kid is inspired by Disney.com. Instead of using a formal register form, Disney.com deploys a way for kids to go through the whole registering process without letting them notice they are actually in the process, making kids build their own avatar step by step and finish register pleasantly.

The interactions in this page is enabled by JavaScript and is called the accordion effect, which expands or minimize to show the whole content upon clicking on ‘older activity’, ‘all sold-outs’ or ‘all works’. The reason is to reduce the menu item needed that might confuse the young user. See Fig. 10.

WIREFRAME | Gallery

‘Gallery’ is the page where the user can showcase their works. The shopping cart icon indicates that this item is also on KidsMall Online and by clicking on that icon; it will connect to the KidsMall Online entry of that item. The user can sort the works by rating, date, and works sell/not sell online. A faceted search is also deployed here to further refine the sort/search result

Faceted Search & Tagging Search on the KidsMall site serves two main functions: to help kids and adults alike find projects or artwork by any aspect of it’s material construction or finished description; just as importantly, search works as an information literacy teaching tool, as kids learn how to tag their own creations, so that others can find them, comment and learn from each other's creative experience. We closely examined both the faceted search capabilities of hobbyist and other winning ecommerce sites, and conducted an open-ended card sort of 76 different images of arts objects and craft materials to determine our search parameters. See Fig. 11.


Fig. 11. the wireframe my avatar


Fig. 12. the wireframe for gallery

ia strategy report - kidsmallusa

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