CheckMeOut

STORY Today is October 30. It’s 4:30 PM. Susan, a divorced mother is sitting in her office when her boss comes in and asks if she can work on an unexpected customer presentation. He needs it on her desk before she goes home. It’s extremely important. Susan agrees knowing she promised her kids she’d pick up Halloween candy, her daughter’s mermaid costume from the dry cleaner’s, and has to relieve the babysitter by 7pm.

The presentation draft took longer than expected so by 5:15 Susan’s flying out the door on her way to Target. Unexpected traffic and a crowded parking lot make it 5:45 before Susan is rushing through the sliding doors. She quickly grabs two party-sized bags of assorted candy and a few other groceries needed at home and heads to the cashier. To her disappointment, Susan discovers a huge line of last-minute Halloween shoppers, 30 strong, and only two checkers. Susan starts to feel anxious and then frustrated, inching through the line.

It’s 6:20 and Susan has to make a choice. Does she drop the candy (the kids love trick-or-treaters) or risk arriving at the dry cleaner’s after hours (her daughter would be in tears)? With so much on her plate, Susan doesn’t have time to waste.

PROBLEM Customers often have to wait in long lines to purchase items at retail stores, creating a huge bottleneck for customer service. Such waiting leads to lost sales, negative views of the brand and employee ability, lost time better served elsewhere, frustration, and potential loss of returning customers.

SOLUTION checkmeout is an easy to use, time-saving, self-checkout mobile app that creates a delightful retail experience for users. The app consists of only a handful of screens and allows for purchases of ten items or less for simplicity and convenience. The app will help boost sales, evoke positive sentiments of the brand, and eliminate existing self-checkout infrastructure and associated maintenance costs. checkmeout can be adopted by any retail store that uses barcoded products. The app is intended to eliminate context switching and cognitive load when users need to get in and out of stores quickly. checkmeout locates which store a user is shopping at through GPS, promotes commonly used screens, such as the barcode scanner and shopping cart, and hides less frequently viewed screens like recent purchases and credit card information.

The use of Salesforce.com technology and Heroku will expedite the adoption of checkmeout through robust API’s and far-reaching cloud services. These technologies will provide otherwise difficult connections to small-to-medium sized businesses.

FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS Possible enhancements for checkmeout include a global search bar to easily locate receipts, the ability to favorite frequently visited stores, an easy way to make returns, the ability to add rewards cards and use coupons, and a simple method for sales associates to verify a checkmeout purchase at the door.