Work in progress.
For images, videos, and extra visual materials; see the Portfolio Assets database.
See also: Interactive Prototype
JD Sports Fashion PLC is a leading retailer and distributor of branded sportswear and fashion wear in the UK and Europe with over 900 stores across the region.
To enhance the in-store shopping experience, JD Sports wanted to reduce queues and speed up checkout times. The idea was to implement a mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) system that would allow store staff to handle sales transactions anywhere on the shop floor. This solution aimed to provide a smoother, more effortless, and more effective checkout process. Customers would be able to pay directly to their sales representative, avoiding the need to wait in long queues at the tills.
Approach & Solution
We rapidly developed a minimum viable product (MVP) for the mPOS application. The goal was to get a working solution into stores quickly, so it could be tested in a real environment and improved with first-hand feedback from customers and store staff. An early interactive prototype was created and shared with stakeholders (accessible via interactive prototype), which helped validate the concept and gather initial input on the user experience.
Implementation & Results
Development of the mPOS application was completed in just six weeks, after which the MVP was introduced to the market in October 2020. The solution was piloted in six JD Sports stores, focused initially on the footwear department. (This choice was data-driven—around 25% of all transactions in JD Sports at the time were footwear purchases paid by card, so footwear was an ideal department to trial a mobile checkout.) The pilot was a success, and the new mobile checkout experience proved popular with both customers and store employees. By early 2022, the mPOS system had been rolled out to over 30 JD Sports outlets across the UK, and plans were in place to continue expanding it to more stores.
Future Plans
Following the successful pilot and initial roll-out, the mPOS application was envisioned to support additional functionalities to further enhance the customer experience. Some planned features included:
Home Delivery: Allowing staff to order products to be delivered directly to a customer’s home if an item was not available in-store.
Easy Returns: Enabling customers to process returns or exchanges on the spot through the mobile system, without needing to queue at customer service.
Inventory Lookup: Giving sales representatives the ability to check product stock in other store locations (the “endless aisle” concept), so they could help customers find items that were out of stock at the current store.
