During summer 2022, I worked as a UI/UX Design Intern at Above & Beyond Studios, an e-commerce company who advocates for local small businesses and encourage people to shop small.
Addition to designing the Freedom Website, I also designed an e-commerce platform for small business owners to manage their inventory and boost sales on the Freedom website.
The product was shipped with the Freedom Website and over 60% of Small Business Users found the tool easy to use and thinks the tool is very helpful for them to manage commodities.
After finishing the designs on the Freedom website, we want to move forward to design our Store Manager tool. The reason we decided that we need a e-commerce management tool is:
We provide services such as advertisement, design and business strategy. And we want out clients to take full advantage of that.
From user interviews, we uncovered some expectations they have for an e-commerce management tool. Here are values that were frequently mentioned:
Before jumping into visualizing solutions, I also wanted to make sure our information architecture is logical and intuitive to our users.
I was in charge of designing the "Product and Store" page and the Home page. Firstly, I came up with a site map for "Product and Store".
Then I did a round of tree testing to identify issues and areas of improvement.
The goal is to determine whether users understand the categories and if they understand the relationship between them. We want to pinpoint underlying issues and find ways to set up a strong fundamental for our product.
I prototyped the site map into a clickable one, I want to record how users proceed information.
We want to record the completion rate of the task and adjust the structure accordingly. I asked users to perform 2 tasks, here is one the the task and result:
We made a few adjustments on the advertising flow based on the testing results and user feedback. We figured that task-based navigation would better achieve users' goals.
After discussing priorities with our project manager, we will be focusing on the 2 main tasks for the Freedom Store Manager:
We use the jobs-to-be-done framework to guide us to come up with solutions to the problems. Here is one example of the exercise we did:
One thing I noticed is that small business owners are usually not familiar with all the e-commerce terminology.
So I designed the pages using inclusive language and avoid using too much industry jargons.
Users can enter store using either side bar navigation, home page dashboard, or go thorough the data table.
In order to figure out the types of metrics that deserve higher visibility, we asked users about what they generally want to know.
After research, we decided to surface impressions and visits.
One thing I noticed is that small business owners are usually not familiar with all the e-commerce terminology. So I designed the pages using inclusive language and avoid using too much industry jargons.
I also decided to add data tips to provide more context for statistics.
For now we created a version that incorporates product listing and advertisement management. However, there are numerous functions that needed to be cover in order to achieve our goal of streamlining the operations of e-commerce management. Including:
