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POWER BY BIGCOMMERCE 

An app for retailers to manage their omni-channel Retail Business On-The-Go

Project Overview

BIGCOMMERCE // provides e-commerce cloud based software solutions and shopping cart software for online businesses. It enables retailers to create, manage and maintain their online e-commerce store using BigCommerce’s advanced cloud-based web app. With emerging trends and changing commerce industry consumers want omni-channel experience.  
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PROBLEM// Retailers now are faced with problems of how to not only sell at multiple channels and touch points giving consumers a personalized brand experience. They struggle with managing their products SKU's, content, inventory, orders, shipments, customers, etc. across channels and don't have a single integrated platform manage these operations. More importantly SMB retailer's struggle to keep in touch of their e-commerce  and customers on-the-go at anytime, anywhere getting insights to make strategic and tactical changes. 
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IDEA/HYPOTHESIS // We believed that a mobile app for retailers on-the-go could be a front line defense for retailers to navigate the shifting sands & complexity  of the omni-channel e-commerce landscape, keeping their customers happy and loyal. 
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DESIGN CHALLENGE //The project involved doing user research, creating product strategy & developing a validated proof of concept for the envisioned mobile solution.

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MY ROLE //This project was done as a consultancy project while I was at General Assembly with team of two other designers. I did all the story boarding, wireframing. 

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MY ROLE

Product/UX  Designer

TEAM 

3 Designers

SPECIALITIES

UX Research

UX/UI Design

Interaction Design

Information Architecture

Visual Design 

SKILLS  

User Interviews/Surveys

White boarding, Sketching 

Personas & Scenarios

Customer Journey Maps

Service BluePrints 

Storyboarding & Scenarios

User Flows

Wire framing, Mocks

Rapid Interactive Prototyping

Proof of Concept Testing 

Usability Testing

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Our Approach 

Since a mobile app with omni-channel features would give BigCommerce a competitive advantage in the e-commerce market, we decided to take a high level approach to the design process, focusing on primary omni-channel elements that would be most important for business owners to have.
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My team and I identified and prioritized specific omni-channel functionalities that were crucial for business owners, conceptualized designs illustrating omni-channel integration in the mobile app, and identified key next steps for Bigcommerce to move forward with the strategy.

DESIGN PROCESS

 Lean UX Methodology

RESEARCH

Market Research 

Competitive analysis 

User Interview, Surveys 

Personas, Service Blueprint

Customer Journey Maps 

Usability Testing 

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STRATEGY

Opportunity Framing

Idea generation,

App Concept, UX Strategy

Scenarios, User Stories 

Product Feature Definition

 Product Roadmap

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DESIGN

 Conceptual Deign 

Info Architecture -Sitemap 

Interaction-User Flows 

Interface-Wireframing 

Interaction-Prototyping

Visual Design  

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DISCOVER :  Research & Insights 

The discovery process allowed us to to understand the problem with unique perspective of the retailers, review the competitor landscape, identify unique mobile opportunities, and develop a mobile strategy that focused specifically on omni-channel. We also audited the current Bigcommerce’s desktop offering and their sun-setted mobile app, and identifying the kinds of merchants and scenarios where omni-channel offering could support them in developing their businesses.

Bigcommerce Sunseted Mobile Experience: an audit  

Competitive Analysis

The discovery process allowed us to to understand the problem, review the competitor landscape, identify unique mobile opportunities, and develop a mobile strategy that focused specifically on omni-channel.
The research involved understanding best practice e-commerce platform solutions and how omni-channel is and is not supported, understanding small-medium business owners’ priorities, understanding Bigcommerce’s current desktop offering and their proposed mobile app, and identifying the kinds of merchants and scenarios where omni-channel offering could support them in developing their businesses.
Final Presentation-Big Commerce Mobile .

Extracting Requirements with Mental Models  

Combining through our research and brainstorming the different things merchants needed to manage omni-channel ecommerce we came up with a broad set of tasks. We categorised and segmented the tasks into behavioural affinities and aligned content and features. This gave us a way to visualise what functionality and content would be useful, what tasks needed supporting, what opportunities were available to innovate and also what could be kept aside from the MVP
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Afterwards, we  entered all the ideas into a spreadsheet and prioritised them according the to the research we had carried with the merchants and SME retailers. This informed our phasing strategy for the app, the product feature roadmap. 
New Presentation-Big Commerce Mobile .03
STRATEGY FOR IDEAL EXPERIENCE

Mobile as Front line Defense to solve Omni-channel eCommerce Management

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Now that we had our pain-points identified, we focused on the best mobile use cases to address them. These user cases would become the foundation of our omni-channel strategy. Omni-channel retail is a world rife with complications and chaos.
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Although we knew that mobile was an established business tool, it was especially needed in omni channel sales due to the overwhelming complexity and shifting sands. 
bigcommerce-idea-generation.jpg

  •    Incremental Strategic Improvements

Mobile provides merchants with a quick look at the overall health of the business and an opportunity to make incremental & impactful changes to their business

  •    Situational Responsiveness

Mobile as central touchpoint that allows merchants to maintain control in the deepening complexity of omni-channel

  •    360 view of customers

Mobile allows merchants to gain real-time access to customer information and keep connected to them.

STRUCTURING THE EXPERIENCE​
Workflows specific to Omnichannel Management
After developing the three key needs we would solve for we identified three 'plot‐points' in our user's life, real scenarios where they will use the app. Crafting several key user journeys and work flows for our personas, was the best way to conceptualize and structure the proposed content and functionality. We began to think about particular usage contexts, the omni channel opportunities and workflows manifesting themselves in the interface would help to support the merchants. We focused on how our personas would think and behave and get their task accomplished rather than getting into specifics about interfaces, technologies or business goals.
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Keeping the scenarios at a high‐level allowed us to work fluidly and explore concepts that would become useful while understanding the workflows. They formed the backbone of our requirements, and allowed us to express these from both a functional and emotional perspective allowing for further empathy with our users. We storyboarded our ideas to help design and communicate more complex interactions and flows.
DESIGNING FOR USER STORIES 
Scenarios & User Flows, Wireframes 

 

We defined a persona from our discovery that helped guide our discussions and decisions on product strategy by continually referring to her needs and task flows. Our discovery allowed us to identify 3 key scenarios that featured specific merchant-mobile interactions and guided our design process.

Let's look at the user flow

STORYBOARD, SCENARIO & USER FLOW 1

Small strategic Improvments

Let's look at the User flow 1

STORYBOARD, SCENARIO & USER FLOW 1

Analystics, Insights & Actions

STORYBOARD, SCENARIO & USER FLOW

360 Customer Relationship Management

BigCommerce Platform Architecture: Proposed Solution

Let's look at the user flow 3

THE FRAMEWORK/SITEMAP

Folding Omnichannel into Current BigCommerce Retail Management Tool 

We took a bottom-up approach to defining the overall architecture of the mobile app solution. Sketching and storyboarding, we generated stacks of ideas about the arrangement of UI, functional and data elements, and interactive behaviours. Starting broad, our vision began evolving into something tangible. A high‐level design language, interactions and the app's anatomy began to piece together and we folded all the omni-channel pieces into their current architecture. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

Outcome & Next Steps 

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  • More extensive user interviews to identify greater opportunities in customer relation management 
  • Deep comparative analysis to identify best practices for mobile dashboard.
  • Usability tests on current control panel/presets to streamline mobile interaction.
  • Move towards medium fidelity- & high-fidelity prototype & get a buy in from the leadership. 
  • Keep doing more usability testing to learn and get more feedback. 
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