SUMMARY
Company Overview
Solid Commerce is a US-based company that helps merchants, brands, and retailers succeed in eCommerce by powering their business operations and online sales across the major marketplaces and web stores.
Business objectives
To completely redesign a complex legacy system of products into a next-generation Multichannel eCommerce Platform to meet customers expectation to sell more and make eCommerce business even more profitable.
My Role
Full-stack product designer, owning full design process from start to implementation and work close with dev team.
Challenges
- Evolve a complex legacy system into a new modern platform.
- Make new platform flexible, scalable and easy adjustable to customers and partners needs.
- Design project for years with limited dev resources.
Old Order Manager. One of the legacy system products to redesign.
Process
RESEARCH
Gather pre requirements
As a first step of my research I started with gathering pre requirements and finding answers to main questions that bothered me: Who? Where? What? Why? and How?
Empathize
To understand the target audience of our products, switch to users' perspective emotionally and get into their shoes, I spent days in different internal trainings, learning how eCommerce world works, what are our users daily routines and tasks.
I spoke directly with our CS team to better understand the audience, what makes people happy and what frustrates them. Together with CS and Product teams, we've narrowed a list of customers and specific end users to perform calls, interviews and run usability testing sessions to observe how people do different tasks when using our products. Based on our observations, I've built empathy maps that reflected what our users do, say, think and feel.
Empathy Map based on observation during usability testing session
Define
Next I defined Problem Statement & User Needs and build several core user personas, which were based on actual users. These personas drove future research, design and development of the whole new platform.
BEHIND THE SCENE
New look and feel and ... engine
When I started at SolidCommerce, their products were looking outdated... UX wasn't bad. It was good the time it was designed and build for. It worked, solving user's problems but it took so much time for people to complete their tasks.
In additional to new look and feel, we also needed a new engine to have a new UX happen. Together with dev team, we picked a list of new technologies we will be using for a new generation platform. With a Material Design as a jumping off point, I had a plan to design look and feel that would help to provide up-to-date modern tools to eCommerce world.
Design System
Using Material Design as a base, I build a rough basic design system. We had limited design and dev resources and I didn’t want to slow down everyone. The developers used this to reference designs elements, components, layout and spacing. Using this system allowed us to do more with less.
DESIGN: Ideate, Prototype, Test....
Low fidelity
Order Manager was the first, most demanded product to redesign based on data we have collected.
Using results of our research phase, I conducted brainstorming sessions with stakeholders of this product, which leaded to the first sketches of the new product. Then I showed lo-fi mockups to our internal users as well as tested with a small group of existing external customers to validate my concepts and problem statements.
Medium fidelity. Crossed.
Skipping wireframes? You know, time is always tight in small companies. We picked Material Design as a base for our Design System, adapted it to enterprise systems needs and created ready-to-use design components.
As a result, I could quickly ideate, iterate and validate, jumping fast from lo-fi sketches to hi-fidelity mockups and skipping medium-fidelity phase.
Hi-fidelity mockups
Interaction, Dynamic Prototyping
It's important to see everything in action and not just static mockups. Dynamic prototypes help us to see the full story of the user journey, do user testing and get new valuable feedback.
Flows
While working on new Order Manager design deliveries, I also created user flows to help the dev team implement everything in a best way.
Partial user flow
RESULTS
Redesigned complex legacy system of products into a next-generation Multichannel eCommerce Platform with focus on people and their needs, scenarios of using products, not on features. An improved and redesigned UX of existing products made customers happy, helping them do their jobs and achieve goals faster. All this stabilized and helped Solid Commerce get new clients, partner with big players of eCommerce world, and run new projects.
Some extra accomplishments
• Based on new eCommerce platform, designed and tailored custom products for various partners and their business needs.
• Incorporated UX into a company culture.
CONCLUSION
Products don't get successful overnight. The road to success contains many iterations, experiments, and testing. It's good to have system thinking and good collaboration skills. It's essential for everyone in a team to be ready to fail, learn, adjust and move forward.
