IPC Shopping Centre

IPC Shopping Centre Mobile App

In conjunction of the mall’s brand refresh, a new mobile application was launched to improve the experience of its shoppers. In addition to guide users around the mall, it come equipped with a proprietary feature to provide dining options based on user’s current mood, known as The Mood Menu.

Introduction

A companion mobile app for shoppers with access to the store directory, promotional updates and rewards
Offers free wifi within the mall for registered user
Includes a food recommendation engine based on user’s current mood, find out how it was designed
More than 10k downloads at launch
Featured on Mumbrella, BFM 89.9 and The Star

Understand: Business Requirements

Several objectives were outlined for the shopper’s mobile app to achieve including:

Enable shoppers to get support from the mall
Enable shoppers to navigate to and around the mall
Keeping shopper up-to-date on promotions or events from the mall

Defining the structure

Low fidelity wireframes were used extensively to discuss and define functionalities of the app with the stakeholders.

Key Features: Accessible Help Features

Browse stores in map or alphabetical list-view. User can switch to different floors on the mall and narrow down their result with the category filter.

After interacting with the help desk (i-Counter), customer will be invited to share their feedback on the level of service they received.

Global search feature enables user to access frequently used feature and searching for store by its name or keyword.

What is it: To help ease the burden on the question on “What to have for lunch, breakfast or dinner, the app introduces a feature that provides recommendations on dining option in IPC, based on the user’s current mood.

Technology: With a large user base in the region and a robust API, Spotify’s API enabled us to determine the mood of the listener based on the listening pattern such as volume, genre, playback frequency, tempo and more. A custom backend workflow was created to ensure the performance for each user query are optimised.

Taxonomy: To ensure the reliability of the food recommendation, participating tenants (F&B outlet) were carefully tagged with flavours that they offer from their menus. For example, a Thai restaurant would contain dishes which are prominently spicy, sweet and sour.

The secret sauce: Based on a scientific study by Professor Robin Dando, PhD ( Cornell University), we managed to describe the connections between different flavours and type of mood.

Result: Once the user connected their Spotify with the IPC app, the system will be able to generate a list of recommended dining options they can enjoy at IPC in seconds.