Universal Mind Helps Wireless Communications Giant Deliver Industry-leading Customer Experience
Universal Mind Creates KODAK Moments Online and On the Go
Developing new ways to improve the KODAK Gallery customer experience
Challenge
The name KODAK has been synonymous with photography for more than a century. So it’s no surprise that KODAK Gallery is the leading consumer website for storing, sharing, and creating mementos with digital photos.
Despite having a strong online presence, the company recently identified a number of areas in which it could improve the KODAK Gallery customer experience. KODAK knew it could maximize customer satisfaction and sales by transforming its time-intensive photo book creation process into an automated, five-minute experience; by streamlining the greeting card shopping process; and by increasing photo upload speeds.
To continue its market leadership, KODAK also needed to establish a mobile presence. A KODAK Gallery mobile app would extend the website’s brand and offerings to the millions of people who capture photos with their smartphones and other mobile devices.
To meet these strategic objectives, KODAK needed a digital solutions partner that understood the KODAK brand, the mobile application space, and the value of customer experience. The company engaged Universal Mind. “We partner with Universal Mind on our very important customer-facing apps,” says Peter Traeg, KODAK’s Lead Software Architect.
Process
Using its proven processes for user experience (UX) design, vision prototyping, and delivery management, Universal Mind introduced KODAK to a streamlined way of developing the new photo book application. The team quickly created two vision prototypes based on different workflows, and then put the prototypes through user testing. Response was overwhelmingly positive, so KODAK gave development the green light.
On the backend, Universal Mind created a more flexible architecture that allowed for better performance, easier maintenance, and more functionality for future development. Not only did the new SMARTFIT photo book application automatically build custom pages for customers in a matter of minutes, but its architecture also served as the foundation for development across all of KODAK’s creative web applications.
Universal Mind built an elegant new KODAK Gallery greeting card shopping experience to help customers quickly zero in on the right card design and style out of thousands. And the agency also helped improve the process of uploading photos to KODAK Gallery, allowing customers to upload multiple files at once, optimizing speeds, and displaying photo thumbnails during the process. And because the uploader’s new RIA codebase supports both Windows and Mac OSX systems, the KODAK team saved development time and resources.
Finally, Universal Mind developed the highly rated, best-in-class KODAK Gallery mobile app. The app enables users to upload multiple photos at once, share photos with family and friends in collaborative Group Albums, and access all of their photos and albums anytime, anywhere.
Results
Universal Mind’s work has yielded terrific business results for KODAK.
In its first two weeks on the market, the KODAK Gallery mobile app was downloaded 100,000 times and ranked eighth in the iPhone Photo/Video category. The app has inspired customers to upload above-average numbers of photos to their accounts, and—most importantly—it has fulfilled its business objective by driving a solid increase in the average shopping cart value on the KODAK Gallery site.
KODAK also reports that, since August of 2010, more than 216,000 SmartFIT books have been created and purchased, and the books have generated $6.6 million in revenue. SMARTFIT has propelled KODAK’s Photo Book product category to 22% net revenue growth over the same period last year.
What’s more, the Kodak Gallery iPhone app settled down to the #237 free app across all categories, all-time, putting it in the top 99.9% of all free apps, above popular apps such as HBO Go, WebMD, United Airlines, Live Nation, Barnes & Noble, and Southwest Airlines.
Those numbers are stellar, but KODAK’s Peter Traeg cites another proof point as his favorite. “The best comment we got was from a competitor,” Traeg says. “He told us his team had tested all of the photo uploading experiences on the market, and he wanted us to know ours was the best.”
Traeg and team are continuing to execute on KODAK’s strategic visions with help from Universal Mind. “At KODAK,” he says, “we value people who can take the ball and run with it.”
