Insite - Improve your retail experience

A concept that was thought off during NTU's iNTUition Hackathon'17 held over a weekend at the Hive on the school campus.

Initially thought with the idea of creating an indoor navigation system for shopping malls, Insite eventually changed to focus more on creating a whole new retail experience for shoppers by working as an assisting mobile application. Insite will not only provide basic navigation within the mall (from shops to shops), but allow shoppers to be more aware of promotions, not to mention giving more promotions to the user as well. We'll be employing bluetooth beacons for each individual shops, specfically 3 each to demarcate a 'zone', in which customers will receive specific promotional or marketing advertisements on their phones they moment they step within such zones. Customers will also be prompted to rate their experience in the store after having spent a certain amount of time in it. Furthermore, it is planned to be dynamic - the information provided on the application will change according to the mall which the user is physically in. The screens below cover the other features that Insite provides.

Fig 1. Initial screen presenting the usual two log in options

Fig 2. Home Screen showcasing indoor navigation, users are able to search for stores within the mall, or even a category. Zones are demarcated with blue triangles.

Fig 3. Side Menu and User Profile Management Screen. We decided to throw in some Gamification with badges and achievements.

Fig 4. Discovery of user curated routes; Users can add routes based on categories (Clothing, Electronics, etc) and add details on the shops included, such as on going promotions and sales.

 Fig 5. Users can accumulate and spend points to redeem vouchers from participating stores. Points can be gained via a few ways, one of which is through positive ratings from curating a route, as pictured above.

Fig 6. The application will also centralize all on going promotions within the mall.

Thus far, most the of the features are meant for customers (B2C), however we do intend to also create a complementing application for businesses to leverage on the data that we can possibly collect (B2B).

Fig 7. Concept of dashboard application for the mall management or individual store owners to leverage on data to make better informed decisions.

Initial application screens and flows were designed on Sketch, and we decided to build the app based on the Ionic2 Framework which used Angular2 and TypeScript as the base languages, along with HTML and SCSS. Ionic enables us to build hybrid apps (compiles into Android and iOS application based on one source code), and since I had prior experience building on Ionic, I believed it was a good choice for rapid prototyping.

However during the hackathon itself, we only managed to create a-less-than-MVP of Insite due to time and resource constraints, but we do intend to continue building on this idea as a possible business.

Further developments of this concept include personalization of the application where customers can save their preferences on start up and edit them whenever they want to, in which they will then receive specific promotions, and of course more ways for users to gain points.

This article was updated on October 21, 2017