Team Assist

Aren't people going to use shop & scan to steal?

The first question that year when describing shop & scan is what about theft? We thought about how we might use mobile technology in our stores to offer a tool to both our team members on the floor and asset protection. After a conversation with our enterprise representative at Apple, we learned of the Enterprise Development Workshop.

What is the Enterprise Development Workshop? 

Apple offers the opportunity to apply to attend a workshop in Cupertino, where you work with a design team, software engineer, and various others to design an App to solve real problems using Apple technologies. It's not a given that you can attend, you first have to be an enterprise customer with a valid problem that could be solved using Apple products & services. The workshop is very design-centric. The goal is at the end of the workshop, you have designed a solution to the real problem. It was fascinating going through the design process with Apple. Design is the most critical part of any project software or otherwise, so to work with the masters in that field was an honor.

The process

The role of the developer was to represent the technical side in the design process but also to produce a working prototype.

The design was continually iterating. It would go something like this.

• Define the problem, whiteboarding, discussions

• The design team would leave and go to a private room, to design

• Come back later and present a design

• Gather feedback 

• Repeat 

The App Prototype

On the last day, I was to present my prototype, but there wasn't any pressure. There are a lot of ways to do App prototyping, but having a real App to show interactions is as real as it gets. 

A video of my presentation is below. You can't tell, but this room is full of about twenty Apple employees. There are six that were part of the workshop and fourteen others. So a little nerve-wracking presenting an App to that many people at Apple. 

About the design

The design is simple. At was stressed not get carried away with unnecessary animation, custom UI. It was all about the functionality. 

So often, designers are trying to be creative and stand out with newer or trendy UI elements, but this was about solving the business problem more than anything else.