Background
One of our clients needed a solution for vendors, resellers and customers to purchase, sell and manage software and cloud services. I was brought on as a UX/UI designer to help merge their e-commerce and lifecycle management systems into one seamless platform.
Project Details
Timeline: 24 months | My Role: UX/UI designer
For this project, I worked alongside three other designers and a team of developers. Together, we collaborated to transform convoluted business requirements into visual design, using tools such as Miro to brainstorm as a group. Our team also worked closely with the client to ensure we were creating solutions that met both the user’s needs and business goals.
As a UX/UI designer, my contributions included:
Interface Design. I helped to maintain the client’s established design system. To help speed up our team's workflow and improve design consistency across the platform, I also organized our design files in Sketch.
Mockup Design. I composed mockups to illustrate ideas for new features and functionality.
High-Fidelity Prototypes. I helped present clickable prototypes to stakeholders and explain the team's decisions behind proposed designs.
Design Handoff. After designs were approved, I helped prepare assets in Sketch to hand off to the development team.
Design QA. I assisted with checking our testing environment to make sure the design was cohesive across the platform and the functionality behaved as expected.
Design Thinking
Because the platform needed to account for three different user types, there was a level of added complexity to the visual design. Before diving into mockups, we started out creating user workflows to grasp a better understanding of what the experience would be like from each user’s perspective. After discussing these flows internally, our design team held workshops with product managers, business analysts, and other key contributors to confirm that our understanding was accurate.
Design System
During this project, I spent a lot of time maintaining and updating the client’s design system. When stakeholders decided to reconfigure the navigation for the platform’s second release, I was responsible for updating the pattern library with the platform’s new header design. Additionally, I helped our team consolidate our design files to speed up our workflow and improve consistency in our mockups.
Project Challenges and Lessons
• Designing a Multi-User Experience. Designing a seamless interface for a technology ecosystem that serves vendors, resellers and consumers was no easy task. This multi-user platform pushed me to think beyond visual designs. I had to think through each user's needs and goals to understand what they needed for a successful experience.
• Understanding A Complex Product. Our team worked hard to grasp a thorough understanding of how the platform worked and what the client wanted to achieve. Ultimately, gaining a thorough understanding of the product and vision made it easier to get stakeholders on board with our design decisions because we were able to better articulate our logic in terms they understood.
• Design Systems Experience. Overall this project taught me a lot about working with design systems. Having an internal system in place helped unify our team’s design process and maintain consistency; something that was especially important for our distributed team.
• Experience With Stakeholder Involvement. I also witnessed firsthand how much more efficient the design team could be when stakeholders, product managers, and other key members that impacted the project were involved in all stages of the design process. Having these contributors helped to provide clarity around unclear requirements and provide direction for design.
