Designing a unified, self-serviceable commerce management platform that enables efficient product launches to millions of customers.
Note: Mockups do not contain actual data to ensure confidentiality of sensitive information.
Defining design strategy, user flows, UI design, and detailed interaction design for a new global commerce management platform.
I collaborate with internal users including Business Operations, Finance, Accounting, Marketing Ops, and Analytics as well as stakeholders from Product Management, Legal, Front-End Engineering, and Back-End Services Engineering.
Senior Product Designer
Oct 2021 to Present
Business Operations, Accounting, Finance, Analytics, and Engineering teams spend thousands of hours configuring new products and prices to be sold across the globe, making sure the data is accurate and meets all legal requirements, and publishing these offerings to be live to customers in the market.
Disjointed legacy tools posed efficiency and cost challenges. Our team sought to build a new platform from the ground up to offer a more cohesive, scalable, and powerful commerce management tool.
Legacy Tool 1
Legacy Tool 2
To understand the full landscape of the domain and build empathy with the different users and stakeholders, I set out to do some deep discovery with 38 interviews and contextual inquiry sessions.
Though each team has their own title and focus, I found their actions within the existing tools while managing products and pricing fell into a few groups with common characteristics and needs.
I identified the multitude of purposes that different users may need to find and manipulate commerce data for:
I found that a high-level journey could be generalized across different teams and workflows, even though each had their own nuanced challenges and complexities.
Note: “Offer” refers to a product and pricing combination, along with details such as eligibility and availability dates. It’s essentially the “offerings” that customers can purchase.
For example, these areas of focus could be free trials, promos with external partners, or products sold in a particular region. Existing tools provide limited and confusing functions for filtering and searching through data.
“You can’t easily determine what are all the offers today. It’s hard to differentiate names, statuses, and what the product is for.” - Legacy tool 2 user
Design goal: Optimize findability.
Empower all users to easily and quickly find what they are looking for with intuitive navigation, filtering and search functionalities, and useful and relevant organization of data.
Though existing tools provided process efficiencies, they required product managers and engineers to still regularly do walkthroughs with users, troubleshooting, and manual hard-coded changes for different scenarios. They were not very self-serviceable.
“I have 0% confidence to set up [an offer] independently without help [in the legacy tool].” - Legacy tool 2 user
Design Goal: Provide clear and concise guidance.
Explain terminology and steps using clear and user-friendly language, provide a visualization of workflows and progress, and use progressive disclosure to minimize overload of information. These help users to more easily process and understand what they need to do in the tool.
Business teams were regularly still filling in large spreadsheets of data manually and handing them off to each other. This leaves a lot of room for human error and inefficiency.
“Many [code] changes are needed due to human error.” - Engineer
“It’s so tedious, we have to go one offer at a time. I wish we could bulk select.” - Legacy tool 1 user
Design Goal: Carefully streamline workflows.
Use automation and helpful guardrails to reduce manual, repetitive, and error-prone tasks and allow users to focus on more critical and creative tasks.
These methods and artifacts were also used throughout discovery work:
Based on research findings, I proposed areas of focus for our approach when designing this new platform.
Product management emphasized these top priorities of this commerce platform for the business.
Engineering proposed these principles to establish our data structure to be more robust, flexible, and scalable than existing models. (“Offer” is referring to a pricing option for a product)
I created visualizations of the existing and new data models to help drive decisions on the best approach moving forward.
With our understanding of the scope of the platform and key priorities, I created this roadmap of the planned chunks of design work and refined it with input from product and engineering.
While many design directions were explored, the main feedback from stakeholders and users focused on grouping and organizing products and pricing options (called “offers”) in specific ways that supported their workflow. This led to the introduction of a concept of campaigns and additional categorization.
At the start of the project, I facilitated a brainstorming workshop with the core team (Design, Product, Engineering, and Business Ops leads) to build alignment and gather more insight into the goals and needs of the different stakeholders involved. Everyone jumped in. It was a fun kickoff for us to start exploring a variety of ideas for this new platform.
I took the ideas and goals and created some lo-fidelity wireframes of different directions to take the platform.
The concepts rated as most useful overall were:
Based on the users’ usefulness ratings and qualitative feedback, I proposed we prioritize these key features to support the top user and business goals:
An umbrella group for a set of offers that captures the shared context, merchandising details, and eligibility.
Labels for whether an offer is the retail price or a promo price, and what type of promo price it is (e.g. free or discounted). This helps to clearly answer the question of “What’s the standard price for X product?” and aligns with the Business Ops team structure where there is 1 team focusing on retail offers and 1 focusing on promo offers.
A way for users to save and easily access the specific configurations of filters they use frequently.
Existing tools provided limited guidance and any help text was hidden in a tooltip. Though this may work for a topic that requires less domain expertise, the complexity of this domain requires more easily accessible guidance.
For all the different types of offers, I conducted a card sort activity where users identified what groupings they thought made most sense and would be most useful to their workflow. I used these to inform the navigation structure and categorization in the tool.
Product card sort
Offer card sort
As reference throughout the process of designing this platform, I looked at Shopify, eBay, and Amazon to see existing patterns for managing large quantities of product and pricing data.
Now that we had alignment on the high-level design direction and roadmap, I dived into design iterations and refinement for each workflow.
I worked in design sprints where I started with more detailed discovery and research, shared concepts for feedback, iterated, created high-fidelity prototypes and designs, user tested, gathered feasibility and product feedback, refined, documented, and finally communicated design decisions and rationales.
Given our enterprise team did not yet have an established design system, I utilized Material UI as the base design system and created custom styling, components, and guidelines on top of this as needed.
Early concept
Iteration 1 user testing
I carved out a unique brand identity for our new platform to distinguish it from legacy tools and other enterprise tools. With so many tools it’s easy to mix them up. I explored a variety of concepts and surveyed stakeholders to determine the direction that best fit our goals.
To balance high priority business initiatives, new requests from users, previously planned features and enhancements, and ongoing bug fixes and usability improvements, I facilitated a workshop that resulted in a feasible prioritization framework for our team.
To assess usability and user satisfaction, I’ve applied a data-driven approach and conducted System Usability Scale (SUS) surveys on existing tooling. I’m currently working on guiding the collection of appropriate analytics to track feature usage and additional metrics. The team has also captured time savings as a result of a few feature launches.
Design and engineering have finished the key MVP features of this new platform, and we are currently working through QA testing and User Acceptance Testing. I am focusing on supporting the testing, designing post-MVP features, and defining a clear vision for the future of the product, empowering Business Ops and other users to independently and confidently manage products and pricing.
Moving forward, I aim to conduct these activities to continue to evaluate progress and make improvements towards the needs of our users and the business:
Alignment is paramount, especially in multifaceted projects. While I initially focused on building strong collaboration with the product managers and front-end engineers, the exclusion of back-end engineering teams early on led to disparities in output. Since then I have advocated for more transparent communication and inclusivity across all relevant teams.
During the many company and team changes throughout the project, I didn’t build as strong of a foundation with new teammates as I should have. This lack of synchronization led to some swirl and rework on the team. I have since put more effort towards building rapport with any new team members I work with, getting to know them more, sharing my design philosophy, and understanding their role and aspirations relating to our projects and domain.
Throughout this project, high priority business initiatives would unexpectedly arise due to the potential revenue or cost savings for the business. I shifted my focus to these areas, sometimes at the expense of user needs. I have learned to think more deeply about the entire system I am working in–not just focusing on my immediate project, users, and team, but all of the broader business goals and implications. Understanding these facets helps me make the most informed decisions when it comes to the product’s design and strategy, advocating more strongly for the most impactful changes.
