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PLV King is a well-known actor in the French communication industry, particularly in the distribution sector. They specialize in POS advertising and help clients plan, create, and deliver their communication materials. In 2010, they digitalized their web-to-print solution as a Windows Software.
Keeping the team aligned was essential because design decisions affected many products. Additionally, the previous software was tailored to each customer's internal process. Our goal was to create a solution that met the needs of all end-users.
We recommended to our client to create a SaaS suite to prepare for future business and user needs. I designed two important products within the suite: AlphaPAC, which assists in planning commercial action plans, and AlphaStudio, which allows you to design communication materials and work with providers until delivery.
First, we immersed ourselves in the POS advertising world by exchanging with the client’s teams, holding meetings and workshops. Then, we could map global processes and formalize them as user journeys. •Finally, we collected user needs and consolidated product objectives.
We quickly iterated to determine the direction for both products and validate it with our client. We then iterated on the information architecture of each product, and planned design sprints for the most complex screens that needed to align with different internal processes of PLV King's customers.
We found that many interactions were too ambitious to be presented as simple mock-ups, such as interactive data tables and drag-and-drop functionality. Our goal was to gain more relevant insights from user testing and make it more convenient for the development team.
After validating the products with the client and end-users, we added the new components to PLV King's Design System. This required a significant amount of work to classify and formalize the new components and styles for the project.
After setting up operations on AlphaPac, brief creative providers with our easy-to-use editor. It allows creating structure, previewing, and making precise comments on the document, making it easy to handle large numbers of providers.
Operations are the key component of the product, they are like folders that contain a list of communication mediums. PLV King's clients can have thousands of them, so we had to create a hub that effectively displays them according to various scenarios and a relevant filter system to easily find them.
An operation always has a large list of products that must be promoted. Each product has specific requirements when it comes to being advertised in a catalog (Alcohol restrictions, food health value, etc.). To simplify this, we designed a quick flow where you can copy and paste your product list in an Excel template, avoiding mistakes while uploading the list.
When preparing an operation, managing many communication mediums can be tedious. To ease this, we designed a table system with form elements in each cell for faster input, a quick and detailed way to add mediums and a Gantt Chart view for better deadline management.
After three months of intensive design and iterations, both products are still in development. Kirk still works with PLV King for micro detailed tasks in order to always improve UX across the Alpha Suit. Due to our several meetings and workshops, PLV Kings teams seem to start having a UX consciousness in the way they work, and that's probably the part we're the proudest of.
This project is surely one of the most ambitious I ever had to work on. I learned better how to manage and design cross-products interactions. Also, I improved even more my communication skills with the client, as we had 3 Design reviews per week and a big Learning phase at the beginning. This project also improved my capacity to work with a very complex ecosystem and my adaptations skills too.
Thanks first of all to our delightful client for trusting Kirk and giving us the ability to work on such an ambitious project. Thanks also to my team : Nicolas and Lucie, who made this project even greater to run..
