Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Todd Michaud spent years leading retail technology teams for Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins and today serves as the VP of IT for a billion-dollar franchise restaurant company. He also runs Power Thinking Media, which helps restaurants and retailers with social and mobile challenges.

Here’s a bit of heresy that will drive your business managers wild: When preparing app requirements, forget business requirements (it needs to provide a 5 percent increase in sales), functional requirements (it needs to ring up a sale) and technical requirements (it needs to be built on Windows). Instead, push to the top of the list interface design requirements (it needs to accomplish the critical tasks in the least number of clicks possible). Believe it or not, that’s where the money will come from.

Think about it, RIM had the BlackBerry on the market for years delivering E-Mail to business users around the world, but it wasn’t until Apple launched the iPhone and that mobile access to E-Mail became ubiquitous. And when it comes to design and usability questions, the best resources for the IT team to ask for help (outside of an actual Interface Designer) are the ones least likely to get the call: Marketing, Creative and Store Associates.

The impact of poor design and usability is significant. I have been involved in launching an application that showed a return of 2 percent in store profitability that never got traction because it was hard to use. Now, “hard to use” is a relative term. But I would suggest in most retail applications you use the same design standards as you do for your customers. Don’t expect your associates to put up with a poor design just because you pay them or because “the results are worth it.” If a retailer is willing to pass up on $20,000 per year in savings because the company thinks an application is too difficult to use, you start to get an idea of how important design really is.

I previously wrote that I think it would be an excellent idea to let the sales clerks design a POS interface. This could also apply to inventory, labor, ordering and clientelling applications. By better understanding how the system is being used, the application can (and should) be modified to deliver the maximum benefit/results.

The Marketing and Creative teams deal with “look and feel” all day long. Why not leverage that expertise to help design your application? If you were to treat your associates (the ones using the application) the same way you treat your end users (the users of your E-Commerce application), you would see a dramatic improvement in usability and overall usage of the application.

Part of the reason these teams do not get involved in retail technology projects is because they don’t directly support their goals of growing store sales. They are charged with finding more customers and getting them to spend more when they walk in the door. Asking them to help out in store operations, although it may indirectly impact their goals, isn’t going to make the CMO happy if those departments miss this quarter’s same-store sales target.

Another problem is that many IT professionals are burdened with a sense of pride when it comes to asking for help. There is this “tell me what you want done and I will go do it” mentality. Asking for creative input (or help, for that matter) on an application doesn’t jive with a lot of IT personalities.