Maintaining backend infrastructure for e-commerce, particularly within the cannabis retail sector, presents unique challenges. The industry is characterized by rapidly changing inventory, dynamic pricing, and diverse promotions, making it crucial for enterprise clients with multiple storefronts to have an efficient and adaptable Business Dashboard. The goal was to enhance the Business Dashboard to better serve these clients by streamlining product group configuration and modernizing the backend infrastructure.
How might we improve the Business Dashboard to better serve enterprise clients with multiple storefronts?
Objectives:
Global Configuration of Product Groups: Enable enterprise partners with multiple locations to configure and manage product groups at a global level, simplifying the process and ensuring consistency across storefronts.
Redesign the Backend Infrastructure: Overhaul the entire backend system with a modern user interface (UI) to improve usability, efficiency, and scalability.
Scope of Work:
Research
The project began with gathering initial requirements from the Business Dashboard Product Manager (PM), documented in a Product Requirements Document (PRD). This document outlined the essential features and capabilities required for the product release.
Extensive research was conducted to understand the specific needs of enterprise clients in the cannabis industry. This involved analyzing current system limitations, user pain points, and industry trends.
Design and Development
Wireframes: Created initial wireframes to establish the basic layout and functionality of the redesigned dashboard.
Lo-Fi and Hi-Fi Mockups: Developed both low-fidelity and high-fidelity mockups to visualize the user interface and user experience. These mockups were iteratively refined based on feedback.
Prototypes: Produced interactive prototypes to simulate the user experience and gather early feedback on design elements and workflows.
Feedback and Collaboration
Partner Success Team: Presented wireframes, mockups, and prototypes to the Partner Success team for feedback and collaborative workshop sessions. This ensured that the design met the practical needs of the enterprise clients.
Design Feedback Sessions: Held weekly design feedback sessions with the iHeartJane product design team to refine the designs and address any issues.
Company-Wide Design Meetings: Conducted monthly design meetings with various departments to gain insights and feedback, ensuring the design aligned with broader company goals and user needs.
Solutions:
Left-Hand Navigation: I implemented a new left-hand navigation system designed to optimize vertical real estate, allowing for efficient use of screen space and accommodating future growth. This navigation layout maximizes the available vertical space, providing a streamlined and expandable menu that can easily accommodate additional features and options as the application evolves.
Overlay Input: For configuring complex settings, I opted for an overlay input design that utilizes the full screen to maximize available real estate. This approach involves presenting a dedicated overlay view that covers the entire screen, providing a focused and expansive interface for users to manage intricate configurations without distractions. By leveraging the full screen, users can interact with all necessary controls and options more comfortably, ensuring a seamless and efficient configuration experience.
Advanced Filters: The Global Menus Product Requirements Document (PRD) called for multiple filter categories and values. Though said categories did narrow down the list of menus to a manageable number to satisfy the specified criteria (Product Groups), the drop down menus took up two to three rows of valuable real estate that should have been delegated to Product Groups. This design was brought to a weekly UX research feedback workshop sessions with the Partner Success team in order to show the loss of space. Together, we collaborated to identify a truly usable faceted search that provides filter categories and values that are appropriate, predictable, free of jargon, and prioritized.
Enhanced Global Configuration: Enterprise partners can now configure product groups at a global level, streamlining inventory management and ensuring consistency across all locations.
Business Dashboard v.1 created for single small retail businesses
