Article
Innovating Beyond Your Customer: The Key to Effective Retail Experiences
User-centered design is no longer enough. Learn the 5 steps of stakeholder-centered design to create more effective experience designs.
When it comes to the future of experience design, the classic user-centered approach will no longer cut it. The brands that continue to narrowly focus on one end-user will miss out on opportunities for innovation and fail to create the truly immersive and effective retail experiences of tomorrow. Instead, we invite you to opt for a more holistic, stakeholder-centered design process
In this seminar, Sam Moon, Sr Industrial Designer and Studio Lead at M3 Design, walks you through our work on Dover’s Anthem Fueling System to illustrate the differences between the two design approaches, the potential risks of ignoring key stakeholders, and the exact steps needed to adopt a stakeholder-centered design process.
Interested in taking Sam’s presentation with you? Download his slide deck below.
Video Transcript:
Emcee:
Please welcome to the stage the studio lead and senior industrial designer for M3, Sam Moon.
Sam Moon:
All right. Good afternoon everybody. Thank you so much for sticking around for the last session of the day. I know happy hour is after this and I certainly don’t want to be the guy standing in the way of that, so I’ll try to make this quick. But I want to make sure that everybody leaves here entertained and informed, and hopefully excited about the way that DFS is using design to influence the future of the fueling experience. So as they said, my name’s Sam Moon. I am an industrial designer and I work at M3 Design right here in Austin, Texas. And at M3 we focus on designing the future of the healthcare, lifestyle, and workplace markets, which is a long way of saying we can design pretty much whatever you need.
And we have been around for 25 years and we’ve worked with a ton of clients during that time, large and small, all kinds of different industries. And I think the benefit of that is that we can bring outside perspective from those adjacent industries, and come up with creative solutions that address all of our clients’ problems. So one of those clients that we’ve had the pleasure of working with over the last 20 years is Dover and its various incarnations over the years. And just scrolling through a couple of our highlights here, including Helios House, Anthem, which is going to be the focus of the case study that we talk about today. And then lastly, what we lovingly referred to as Big Boy. I don’t know the real name of it, but I’m always going to call it Big Boy. And if you get a chance to see that thing, definitely take it because it’s pretty mind blowing.
So over those years working with Dover as well as working with all of our other clients, we’ve kind of developed a little bit of an approach to the way that we tackle complex problems. The main one is going to be stakeholder centered design, which is kind of the focus of the rest of the presentation. But we support that process with some of these kind of high level philosophies. First one being design is a lot more than skin deep. I think there’s a misconception about what designers do. I think a lot of people imagine head in the cloud. You’re not based in reality, you’re just looking at aesthetics and that’s the other guys. So at M3 we look at it as a tool to achieve business objectives for our clients. There’s a lot of people out there that can make a nice looking object, that can make a nice looking dispenser, but there’s a lot less people and a lot less teams out there that can create a positive experience both for the end user, the end customer, as well as helping our clients achieve ROI, so much more than skin deep and supporting that.
We also like to be very strategic in how we implement technology into our projects. So we pride ourselves on taking on a lot of projects that combine technology with hardware and solving complex solutions using technology. But that’s not to say that we’re just throwing out technology for technology’s sake. You have to be careful and strategic in how you implement these types of things because if you start to add too much, it’s actually going to serve the opposite purpose and start getting in the way of the jobs to be done by the user. And it’s going to reduce your chance of success.
And lastly… Oh boy. Okay, and lastly this has been said a million times but it’s very difficult to achieve a simple and intuitive experience for the user. You’d be amazed with how much time we spend as a design team working with our clients to try to streamline the process and get things to seamlessly incorporate into our stakeholders lives. It’s very easy to say, oh, I just want it to be simple. That’s fine but there’s a lot of stuff that goes into making that actually happen. And this is especially true when you combine the previous slide which is talking about incorporation of technology.
All right, so now that we’re through with kind of the introduction, I want to get into the main part of the presentation today. So if anybody is familiar with design you’re probably thinking, why are you saying stakeholder center design. It’s user center design. You’re a designer, you should know that. Well, that’s true. User center design is sort of… We’ve moved away from using that term because we find that what happens is you tend to get hyper focused on only one person or one group of stakeholders, and you miss a lot of other things because they’re in your peripheral vision. So that’s why we focus and put such an emphasis on calling it stakeholder center design all the way through, because it’s the best way to make sure that you’re covering all your bases. And I’ll start off with a little anecdote on why this is important.
So this is from a previous life, my old job. And I apologize for the dad joke because this is all about garbage cans, not related at all to the fueling experience. But it kind of illustrates the importance of stakeholder centered design on something even as simple as a trash can. So we’re working with OXO and they’re pretty well known homeware brand. They offer a lot of really high end home goods, and they’re well known in the design community, very highly regarded. And they hired us to design a trash can for them, something they’d never done before. So we did it, went through the process, had a beautiful trashcan, delivered it. We were done with the project, and they’re sitting at a meeting and one of their internal stakeholders raises their hand and says, “Hey, we’ve never made anything like this and the facility that we would use is overseas, is also significantly larger than anything we’ve ever shipped. And the cost of shipping 90% dead air across the ocean is going to shoot the price of this trash can up so high that nobody’s ever going to buy it.”
So what happened? They killed the project. So it can be extremely frustrating. And again like I said, even on something as simple as a trashcan, you can make the tiniest mistake like this and the project is dead. So what happens when you get into designing something as complicated as say a gas pump or… Excuse me, a fuel dispenser, or let’s say in this scenario an MRI machine.
So what I would ask of all of you is who is the user in this image? Is it the radiologist sitting in the back room? Is it the patient? Is it the tech out there? There’s other people that aren’t even on the screen. There’s hospital administrators that are responsible for purchasing it. There’s the actual physician who needs to go and read these scans and they need to be high quality. So when you start dealing with more of a complex system like a fuel dispenser are like an MRI machine, it’s really important to zoom out and say… I think the impulse is to say, obviously the user is the patient, they’re the one getting the MRI. But if you really think about it, there’s a lot more people involved in the process. So if I were to take a look at just the user side of the things, I could still probably do a fairly decent job of designing an MRI machine. But the problem that you’re going to see here is this is only focused on the patient experience. Now, when we really zoom out there’s a lot more things happening here and there’s a lot more stakeholders involved. Like I said, so all the way from purchasing, getting it installed, then you get into the actual patient experience, getting into maintenance and then getting into end of life, and then the whole cycle starts all over.
So it’s important to zoom out and think about how you can strategically use design in each of these phases in order to make sure that you’re delivering a high quality solution for all the stakeholders. On that note, as I said before, if we only look at the patient as the user we’re limited to those kind of three steps that I showed in the previous slide. But if we expand out and look at all the other people that are involved in the process, it gives us a much better sense of what’s going on and who’s involved. So as I said earlier, we’ve got this middle section here and you can see how little the patient is actually involved. Now, granted that middle section is going to be a huge portion of the product’s life cycle. But there’s all these other things happening that if we didn’t step back and ask this question, we would completely miss these things. So being able to identify all those different areas is going to help you not miss that link in the chain that’s going to cause your product to fail. And it’s going to help you identify rich areas where you can use creative thinking to come up with new and innovative solutions.
So I know this is a little bit off topic considering the purpose of this convention, but I think I’m using it to illustrate the fact that you can use this process in literally any industry. So now like I said earlier, we’re going to focus on Anthem as kind of the case study here. And we’ll start off by introducing what are the five steps of stakeholder center design. So I keep saying that and I kind of have talked around it with those other examples, but really at the end of the day we’re talking about five steps. First, you need to map that product journey, the entire thing not just what you initially start with as your gut feeling of who the main user is. Then we’re going to go back identify all of our stakeholders whoever they may be, again even outside of what your perception of who the user would be. Map them onto one another into that journey map.
And once you have that journey map put together, at that point you’re going to identify all the unknowns because frankly, a lot of those stakeholders were probably invisible to you before. So you’re not necessarily going to be aware of what their pain points might be. So you need to go and fill those gaps in knowledge with targeted research. And then and only then can you really start to come up with concepts and ideate. And you’ll notice like I said earlier, as a designer at this point I haven’t even picked up a pen and paper. We’re still kind of out there trying to figure out what the problem is that we can design the appropriate solution.
So at the beginning of the Anthem project, DFS came to us and they had a pre-existing prototype, had the big screen, had a lot of other functionalities like gesture control, cameras, speakers, all kinds of stuff. And I think the goal that they wanted to achieve by coming to us was to say, Okay, we have this great thing, it can do all these things. How do we get from this to something that we can send to market that’s a viable product that our clients will want to purchase, and that will provide a positive experience for the fueling customer.
So to start off we kind of dove in and we’re trying to understand the market a little bit better. And this quote’s a couple years old now, but it was something that really kind of made the light go off in my head, which is service stations need to move from a vehicle centric business model to a customer centric one in order to capture new product and service opportunities. So the reason that kind of made the light bulb go off is because it reminded me that, hey, we’re not just talking about the fueling customer here, we’re talking about the station owner. We’re talking about Dover. We’re talking about the service folks all down the line and we need to be stepping back and considering all these people.
So from there, obviously you could go to the extreme and completely reinvent the entire fueling experience. That wasn’t really in scope of this project and we were mostly focused on kind of the existing infrastructure, so the fueling dispenser for a court and the convenience store. So I want to show an example of what might happen if we just went up to the end customer, the fueling customer and said, hey, what do you want out of a fuel dispenser? I think what would probably happen is, and we’ve heard this a lot in all the research that we’ve done with Anthem and afterward, is that I don’t want to be bombarded with ads. I don’t want things blasting in my face. So the problem with that is if I were to only take that point of view, what would happen is I’d come back and I’d have the Obelisk from Space Odyssey with a nozzle hanging off the side. And then I would be fired. So I need to step back and try to say, okay, why do all the dispensers around that I’ve ever been to have a similar experience? Why is it the way that it is?
So we took a step back and said, all right, let’s map the user journey across a typical transaction. There’s a couple of paths here. Do they go in the store and use the restroom? Do they pay with card or cash? And there’s a lot of steps here, and you can kind of start to understand why there are so many things happening through… There’s so many touch points on the dispenser. There are so many things happening and prompts that you need to address during that transaction. So even with this, again, we’re still just focused on the user, the fueling customer. And there is probably some innovations that we could do, a couple of areas of opportunity but the problem is they’re going to be more incremental than they are going to be revolutionary. And with what the prototype of Anthem could do, we wanted to make sure that we upleveled and gave more value to that.
So we took a step back and said, all right, what are all the steps in the product journey of a fuel dispenser, not just from the end customer’s perspective. So from the time that somebody realizes that they have a need and they start searching around for what kind of fuel dispenser do I want to get? They have to make that purchase. They’re going to acquire it and get it to the site, install it, operation. And I highlighted this because if we’re talking about traditional user centered design, that’s where most of your process is going to live. But again, we’re looking further back. Then we’ve got service and then we’ve got end of life. And as with the other one it circles back to the beginning. So now that we kind of have a high level… And I’ll take a pause here and say, this is an abbreviated presentation. Obviously you all know a lot of this to a lot more depth than what I’m showing here, but this is grossly oversimplified.
But that being said, we’ve kind of got our high level steps and then we’ve started to identify, okay, who are our stakeholders in this process? Again, the fueling customer being a big one, but there are lots of other people that are involved, distributors, service techs, manufacturer, owners and operators and direct accounts. So now that we have these two elements, we can overlay them with each other. And as with the MRI machine, you see that where the customer lies is actually a pretty… It’s only one step in a longer process. And granted that is big step, that’s probably the largest step in this entire thing. But if we’re looking at this just one to one, you can see how many other stakeholders are doing so many other things across the life cycle of the product. And that’s where we need to be looking to really differentiate ourselves. So we need to be doing that on top of providing a positive experience for the customer doing the transaction.
All right, so the next step is again to identify our unknowns. What don’t we know? Are we even missing a stakeholder at this point? We’re working closely with DFS, but maybe they haven’t identified somebody. We don’t know everything. We’re new to the process and we’re just helping them get an outside perspective. So we might be missing somebody. Are there steps that we missed, that we didn’t identify? And if we have that information, we can start to zoom in a little bit and say, okay, if we have everything correct, what are the pain points and what are the unmet needs of those stakeholders across the entire product lifecycle? So the fifth step is to go out in the field and figure it out. So this is us up at NACS a couple of years ago in Chicago with a very early version of Anthem, as well as in our studio doing some iterative prototyping, testing, talking to the end customers, talking to distributors and site owners and things like that. To try to understand, okay, what are you looking for? What are you looking to get out of the next generation of fuel dispenser?
And once we had that information as an executive summary, I guess, what we found was it’s really about money, there’s no surprise there. Really if you look at two fueling stations across the street, the gas price is probably going to be pretty similar. And it was a revelation for us that most of the revenue that’s coming into these C stores is from people making purchases, not revenue but profit is from people making in-store purchases. So once we had identified that along with a number of other insights here, this is kind of a short list. You can see there are some up here with the fueling customer, but these are other pain points that we identified for a lot of the other stakeholders that make up that product lifecycle. And we could start to say, okay, let’s redo our journey map and point out the specific areas where all these pain points exist.
So this is the exact same thing that we showed earlier in that earlier slide. And you can even see up top here, this is representative of the user journey when they’re actually making the transaction, but all the rest of these are those bars that were shown before just broken down. And once you break those down you can start to say, okay, I’m reading between the lines here and I’m going to start to identify and pull out specific areas that are ripe for ideation and that are ripe for innovation. So you can really make a high impact device. So some of these… I’m not going to dive into too much detail here, but basically what we found out was that when we start to look at what Anthem was when it originally came to us, a lot of the things that were in it were viable but they were maybe more down the road.
And we did start to identify things like the big screen is necessary for a number of reasons. I’ll talk about that in a little bit. So once you get through that process, now you can really start to do ideation. You can come up with concepts, you can mock things up in the studio. This is us working with the good folks at Willow Tree to kind of understand what’s the onscreen experience that’s going to support that hardware solution. And the point I want to make here very quickly is that, don’t ever let anybody tell you that you can do the software after, especially when it’s going to be tied to a piece of hardware like this. They really need to be done side by side. And that’s kind of what’s happening here. We’ve got Velcro and we’re moving components around and trying to say, if the onscreen experience looks like this, where does this need to be? If it looks like this, where does this need to be?
So they can really create a more seamless experience all the way around, rather than saying, ah, we’ll kick the can down the road on the onscreen experience. Let’s just get the hardware done because the software is easy. We have definitely found that to not be the case. All right. And again, just kind of getting further and further into refinement and saying, okay, we know we like this big screen because it does a couple of things for us. It gives the store owner an opportunity to advertise in a very impactful way. It gives them a way to show sales and potentially in the future as you heard in one of the previous discussions, to actually purchase items from the dispenser which is going to drive their revenue way up. And it’s also much more convenient. One of the reasons we heard from a lot of the people we talked to, was the reason I don’t make more purchases from the store is because I don’t actually want to go in there.
So if you could do it right from the dispenser, not only are you streamlining the experience from the end customer’s perspective, but you’re also adding a lot of value to the store owner as well. And there’s some other things going on in here, we spend a lot of time talking about high wear items. So obviously the push to start buttons have been deported onto the screen. And then we spend a lot of time thinking about what the future might be if we were to go paperless or if everything becomes touchless. How does the design evolve in the future to kind of still not look like something’s missing? So there’s a lot of time that was spent there. And additionally, just maintaining some of the visual cues that exist on Ovation. So this kind of U shape was one of the big drivers and maintaining that, so that when you see it, you kind of have a general idea of what you’re looking at. And additionally, a big part of this as well when we talk about the maintenance side of things, was that it actually fits in the same frame as Ovation 2.
So from a maintenance perspective, we’re talking about something that is as easy at least to maintain hopefully then what Ovation was. So thinking again from the maintenance side of things. Lastly on that note, with this giant screen here, you can do a lot more things that don’t necessarily require you updating the graphics that are on the dispenser. You can accomplish a lot of that on the screen. You can have custom skins and things like that. So it opened up a lot of doors for a lot of those stakeholders who maybe you would wait too long to update the graphics on your dispenser because it’s a real pain to do it. Now you can do it a lot more simply by using that onscreen experience. So we found that a lot of the things that came to us with the original version of Anthem were viable. And we just tried to kind of plan for the future about how can the things that people aren’t ready for yet or aren’t appropriate for the MVP… going back to that technology discussion, how can we implement those in the future and still create a really nice experience with the first version of Anthem.
And even after we went through the long and lengthy process of getting Anthem up to where it is. And even today we’re still working with the DFS team to understand how can we implement some of those other technologies, to further improve on the MVP. We want this to… It’s highly scalable which creates opportunities in the future. Like I said we’ve still got a camera in there, right now it’s being used for one thing but in the future maybe it could be used for something else. We’ve got all this space where some of these high wear items might go away in the future, what can we put there? So there’s lots of scalability that was built into this. And we’re still doing research to understand how some of those future features can become incorporated into the design. So it’s ongoing.
And like I said, it doesn’t really stop here. DFS is still working hard to incorporate layer on value added services so that you all as customers can achieve the ROI that you’re looking for. And we practice what we preach. Like I said, we’re still doing research to this day to understand new things that we can do with something that’s as powerful and flexible as Anthem. So we’re out here talking to distributors, so don’t be surprised if we come knocking on your door sometime soon. So to wrap up, quickly just with the stakeholder center design as a topic, process that we like to go through, take inventory of all your stakeholders and how they interact with your product or your experience over its life cycle. Identify all the gaps in knowledge that might be present that you don’t know about and go out and fill those gaps with ethnographic research, online interviews, surveys, it could be whatever. Really, you just want to make sure that you’re not missing something along the way that’s going to be a big gotcha down the road.
And once you have those things, update the journey map and establish a framework that you can build off of to create concepts. And that you can then evaluate and go back and look at the success criteria that was set when you created that journey map. So you have something to kind of bounce back and forth and say, here’s a concept. Does it satisfy what we are trying to accomplish? Yes or no? And it can help you and get through the development process a lot faster. Identify new product and system opportunities, ideate and refine, and then go out there and dominate, so that’s kind of the goal that we have when we start one of these efforts. And I think for me that is pretty much it. I know I sped through that pretty quickly, but open it up for some Q and A.
John Morris:
Someone told me to stand on the stage because I was standing in the dark before. So here I am. Sam, great job.
Sam Moon:
Thank you.
John Morris:
Sam’s being a little bit humble with regard to his participation in the design of Anthem. And this man single-handedly designed and did the CAD work for the initial bezel proof of concept, and then our engineering team took it and industrialized it. So nice job. All right, I have a couple questions here on the app. What time does the bar open? I kid. Okay, Sam, dig into some of the details and tell us a little bit about you guys participating in NACS. And then also hosting some sessions to have folks come to the office and everything and do the voice of customer.
Sam Moon:
Yeah, so we had that prototype of Anthem out at NACS. And what we did was we had… It was a pretty unique opportunity, not something that we would be able to attend every day. So we prepared quite a bit in advance… Excuse me, with surveys. And we were out there kind of… Anybody that walked by that looked even remotely interested, we’d grab them and kind of get their opinion. So it was some people were store owners, some people owned one store, some people owned 10, some were giant multimillion dollar networks. And we just kind of wanted to see, okay, you see Anthem here, what do you like about it? What don’t you like about it? What’s working? What opportunities do you see? Because they’re going to have a totally different perspective than what we have. So we want to try to catch as much of that so that we can gather that rich stuff and build it into all of our concepts.
So we were out there with surveys and kind of talking with all those folks, capturing their input. We also did some back at the Dover facility as well, talking specifically to distributors and some direct accounts folks. And then for the… There’s nothing up there, for the In Studio ones where we brought… Luckily it’s one of the easier recruitment jobs that we’ve done. It’s not trying to find a surgeon, it’s like have you refueled a car before? So we brought in a lot of people to kind of talk through that and have them play around with the interface and say, what makes sense here? What doesn’t make sense here? I know at that time we still had the gesture control and people were struggling with it.
And I think as I said before, maybe it’s something that we could do in the future particularly with COVID but at that time people just weren’t ready for it. They just didn’t understand it. So we gathered a couple of pieces from that. And really just watching them use it… People say a lot of things, but when you really watch them do it, you learn a lot more.
John Morris:
Thanks. So you bring up the gesture control and there were a lot of wild ideas. So the question here from the app is tell us about a couple of the wild, outrageous ideas, feature ideas that were requested that didn’t make it to the initial launch.
Sam Moon:
Gotcha. Yeah, so that was one of them… I’m trying to think back. There was the facial recognition thing, I wouldn’t classify that as wild necessarily. But again, it was something where a lot of people were like yeah, it’s cool on my phone but I don’t know about the dispenser recognizing me. Not to say that they would never be comfortable with it, but again at this time we allotted space for it with the camera but it’s not something that’s active or being used right now. So there’s a place for that in the future. We also explored some stuff recently for COVID for cleanliness. So we had some wild ideas about how to sanitize the screen in between, how to sanitize the nozzle. So there were some wild things there that haven’t quite come to fruition yet, or I’m not sure where those are at. But those were probably some of the more wild ones, like a little UV light that pipes across the screen and some kind of funky stuff like that.
John Morris:
I’m thinking of a couple of particular ideas that Scott Negley had.
Sam Moon:
Yep.
John Morris:
Okay. Walk up music.
Sam Moon:
Oh, there we go.
John Morris:
Yes(Singing). And the other one was the fragrance sticks to play an ad, and then little poofs of coffee whiffs.
Sam Moon:
Oh yeah, that the smellovision.
John Morris:
So yeah, not everything makes it to the MVP, but now we’re doing the value added services so stay tuned for a fragrance stick near you. Okay, little bit of a question here about device design. So you made a statement and said something along the lines of you can’t design the digital experience after the device design. It should be instead to be done in tandem. Do you have a story or an example of when that was the case?
Sam Moon:
We’ve done a lot of things in the industrial field where you kind of get to the end and you’re like, Ooh, we’ve already spent a bunch of money on this expensive casting, and really what we would like to do is move this over here a little bit better but we can’t do it. So it’s really something that, I wouldn’t say it’s been a total deal breaker on anything. But what it does is it allows you to be more flexible because it’s earlier on in the process. And you can make those kind of changes as they’re needed rather than having to create a less ideal onscreen experience, because you’re limited with decisions you’ve already made on the hardware side of things. So that’s always really tricky when you try to combine the two because there is that impulse to wait, but it’s really important to do them as close to…Even if you’re not fully designing, it’s really more of wire frame. Where do we want things on screen so that when we look at where we have the receipt printer and the credit card reader, can we make call outs to those on the screen? So little things like that, that just kind of elevate the experience. It’s not to say you can’t do them separate, but I found it’s best practice to do them as close to in line as you can.
John Morris:
Anika ask a question about design decisions and how to deal with them when you have conflicting design requests from various stakeholders.
Sam Moon:
Sure. Yeah, that’s a tough one. It really comes down to… One of the things I didn’t really show here is that there’s a whole process going on in the background in terms of prioritization. Which of these steps do we really value? We can identify as much as we want in the search and acquire, but really at the end of the day it is still really about the everyday use. So you can kind of… I don’t want to say bias, but you can prioritize some of them over the others just to help you narrow down. And we use a process called success drivers. They’re all derived from that process that we just talked about. And what that is we have kind of five or six high level attributes that we’re trying to achieve that say, if we do all these things is this product going to be successful?
And they’re not necessarily metrics, it’s kind of a touchy feely thing a little bit. So some people are uncomfortable with that but at the end of the day that’s kind of what we use to make decisions. How many of these success drivers are we satisfying?
John Morris:
There’s a question that asks, how many versions of iterations on a product do you recommend? What’s the sweet spot? How many iterations do you do? What’s the magic number for how many reviews should be conducted?
Sam Moon:
Gotcha. I’m trying to think with this one we did quite a few. We had the original iteration. I know when you all came over to the studio, we had 60 to 100 sketches from which we picked eight, from which we picked two, those went into CAD. And those were kind of evaluated with models and mock-ups. So it’s a little bit dependent on the complexity of the project. If I go back to the trash can I would probably need a lot less for that. But when you start talking about something that’s as complex as this, those iteration cycles definitely increase. So I don’t know if there’s a magic number, it’s certainly more than one. But yeah, three to five maybe would probably be a good ballpark.
John Morris:
I was going to make a bad joke about something but I’m not going to. What was your biggest setback and how did you overcome it?
Sam Moon:
This was a little bit after the fact, but I think last year when we were doing a lot of the secondary research it was really difficult to get ahold of people for research. Due to the pandemic we were doing all of them remotely, so that was a pretty big challenge. In terms of setback on the product itself, I wouldn’t call it a setback necessarily but I think our first sketches were just like this beautiful screen with nothing around it. And then things kind of started getting added back and back and back. And obviously there’s a reason for that and the final design satisfied what it really needed to be. We can’t get too attached to a pretty sketch, but it’s not necessarily a setback but it was kind of like you see this thing super sleek and then it gets stuff added back onto it, so that would probably be the one.
John Morris:
Yeah, I remember fondly it’s like, all right, well, do we have to put that printer?
Sam Moon:
Yeah.
John Morris:
Okay. In your opinion, will future pumps forego the screen completely and instead use vehicle screens or mobile devices?
Sam Moon:
That’s a great question. I think it’s definitely possible. I’ll fully admit the interplay between those things. I know there’s a lot of regulations and stuff that go into that, which I’m not necessarily an expert on. But that was a topic of discussion during the research last year was, if I don’t want to touch the dispenser can I just remote the screen onto my cell phone? And a lot of people responded well to that, but then the question becomes how do you implement it? And then obviously with the Teslas and well, they don’t need gas, but people are following that model and putting gigantic screens in instead of all the knobs and switches and things like that. So as that starts to become more commonplace, I could definitely see it happening. Yeah, I think it would make a lot of sense.
John Morris:
What Easter egg have you built into Anthem? Or maybe that’s better for me.
Sam Moon:
Yeah, that’s probably better for you.
John Morris:
Yeah, we have a secure OS people. We do not have any kind of funny Easter eggs or anything like that. But now that you got the wheels spinning, we’ll see. How important is the Anthem UX to be highly differentiated by petroleum brand versus consumers having some commonality across brands?
Sam Moon:
Well, I think if I understand correctly, the onscreen experience is going to be pretty much the same regardless of where you go. It might have a different appearance or a different skin. But I think the nice thing about this is it’s so noticeable from a distance that as you’re driving past you can say, they have Anthem, they don’t have Anthem and you can come in kind of prepared for that. As far as consistency goes, the onscreen experience is probably going to change a little bit depending on what this station has in terms of advertising and content and things like that. But a lot of the onscreen elements, the push to start buttons are in relatively the same location as they are currently on the ones that have physical push to start buttons.
So we tried to kind of incorporate some of those aspects into working with Willow Tree again on the onscreen experience, to make sure that it wasn’t too huge of a jump. When somebody comes up to this big screen, they’re like, well, what is this? What do I do now? Because we did experience some of that when people were in our studio. So hopefully that answers the question.
John Morris:
Does Anthem handle IDPA card reader system?
Sam Moon:
Sorry, what was that?
John Morris:
This is a question more suitable for me, but yes, we have IDPAs Anthems installed in production in San Antonio at the HEB. Is there a plan to incorporate the wireless connect in the standard design or will that always be a separate adder from the dispenser? I can invite Anika for that or try to answer it here. So our subscriber unit is an IP enabler for the dispenser itself. And that means that it’s not tightly incorporated into the payment terminal board itself, which gives us more flexibility to be able to provide that connectivity across all the products that go in the pump. So we shouldn’t have it tightly coupled to an actual product in my opinion, but I’m open to others feedback.
Anika:
Yeah, [inaudible].
John Morris:
Okay. So Anika, I’m not sure everybody heard you but I think I can maybe repeat. Yeah, the Avalanche Subscriber Unit goes into the pump in the field. And so coming to a theater near you, it’ll be coming directly shipped in and installed in the dispenser from the factory. Right? Okay. From the maintenance side, can the pump provide reports of damaged boards, lifetime of batteries, or any device on the dispenser?
Sam Moon:
What should I say?
John Morris:
You can’t answer that?
Sam Moon:
Yeah, sorry.
John Morris:
Yeah. So our DX Monitor, remote monitoring and diagnostics tool provides the metrics in order to be able to do this type of diagnostics, and fire alerts and set up reports for asset allocation or asset tracking and stuff like that. So yeah, our DX monitor, remote monitoring and diagnostics cloud service works with Anthem. So I’ve hit all the questions in the Q and A app, Sam, great job. Thank you very much. Are there any other questions?
Sam Moon:
Thanks everybody.
John Morris:
Okay.
