Context
As L.I.F.E Italia's flagship product, a connected t-shirt, was about to enter its commercialization phase, the company was in need of three internal tools:
- an inventory manager
- an inventory manager
- an order manager (supply chain, product activation, delivery, and service)
- a B2B customers database
My role
As the Lead UX/UI Designer on this project, I conducted the initial phase of product discovery by leading user research, finding key solutions elements via user journeys, exploring and refining a solution, and finally supporting the development team with the implementation of the final prototype to ship the product.
Dashboard, filters in use (Logo has been modified for privacy reasons).
Approach: User Research and scope definition
My first approach to the project has been to conduct interviews with the different internal stakeholders, to learn better about the roadblocks they were experiencing at the time, their expectations of the tool, how they were envisioning success in their daily job and how to reach this goal.
This is how I always start a project, as I consider that being knowledgeable about the problem enables me to accurately pursue solutions.
I soon realized that the users were facing complex workflows, due to the product itself, as some parts needed to be activated by different services at different times.
After having gathered the insights from my user, I started working on a solution by elaborating User Journeys.
Finding a solution and iterations
Those User Journeys helped me to understand each user's workflow and built up an excellent base to consolidate our user flows (created on Whimsical). This very important step gave me a better grasp of the features needed and the next steps to build our solution.
User Flow for Operations built on Whimsical. See details here
Our next step was designing mid-fi wireframes via Figma (they can be seen here) so that we could proceed with usability testing of our prototype with the Operations Officer and his team.
In parallel, User Stories were written in collaboration with the dev team, to ensure that the solution was framed well for building.
High fidelity screens and implementation support
Once we were assured that our solution had the necessary value and great usability, we proceeded to define our high-fidelity interfaces and designed the screen mock-ups both for the user's happy path and for error cases.
I worked in collaboration with Marta Aragon Gallardo.
I worked in collaboration with Marta Aragon Gallardo.
Outcome
Before being offered this internal tool, my colleagues were planning to use Excel sheets to track their work. The Saas Order Manager has automatized and simplified their workflow and reduced their frustration at work.
At the time of writing, the platform had only been used to manage orders with hospital partners: the perfect order index had reached 92%, and the order cycle time was extremely competitive with the market, thanks to an improved workflow.
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