Custom Application Improves Retailer’s Shopping Experience
A custom image capture application allows an automotive retailer to dramatically improve the shopping experience by consistently rendering vehicle images and greatly reducing the time to inventory, image and upload new vehicles to the website, cutting time to capture images by 50%. These efficiencies create faster time to market and employee efficiency gains, as well a greater control over the end product. The bottom line: when shopping for vehicles, customers see them up close with a consistent quality that adds additional comfort to their already exciting shopping experience.
STRATEGIC SNAPSHOT
Challenge
Improve retailer’s automated photo carousels to be more user friendly, customizable and easier to manage.
Strategy
Create efficiencies in image upload workflow and improve shopper experience by consistently rendering vehicle images.
Outcome
Design and build custom solution with features to automate formerly manual processes and create consistent, high quality rendered images.
The bottom line: when shopping for vehicles, customers now see them up close with a consistent quality that adds additional comfort to their already exciting shopping experience.
Challenge
An automotive retailer invested in automated photo studio carousels designed to create a process for capturing consistent website images for their inventory. However, the embedded software was not user friendly, did not align with their desired workflow and had limited customization.
The existing software captured multiple images of the vehicles, but applied a standard cropping ratio to every angle, creating less than optimal images. It also required users to name and reorder photos, import to the server and manually upload to the website. UDig was engaged to redesign the interface and improve the photo capture functionality, as well as allow employees to integrate mobile phone and 360 degree photos along with the DSLR photo capture.
Outcome
The UDig Consulting team worked with business and technology stakeholders to understand the desired process and results for the application, visiting an active buying center and photo studio to see the existing process and technology in action. Working closely with client resources UDig helped design and build a new Windows Presentation Foundation solution that both worked on existing Windows 7 machines but would also be ready for their Windows 10 upgrade as a Universal Application.
A new auto-crop capability was designed and built which allows the new application to automatically detect the vehicle boundaries and crop ratio, resulting in consistent images from every angle. Utilizing a pre-defined nomenclature, each image is named and ordered consistently and automatically, tagged with the appropriate meta-data and uploaded to Azure, where the images are automatically fed to the website.
How We Did It
Tech Stack
- Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation
- Azure
