Project Journey
User research for this project consisted of weekly meetings and multiple rounds of user testing with the XO Group production coordinators on the fashion team. They are the only users in the office that were going to use the old CMS and were also the point of contact for the team in China, who would be using this application the most heavily. They were an extremely valuable resource by explaining exactly what they envisioned the product should be. Me and my fellow design partner on the project (Caryn Audenreid) worked with the product and tech teams to turn their feedback into an actionable application. We used Invision prototypes to walk the team through what we were working on and the weekly communication led to an interface that everybody "loved" using. The end result led to data entries being entered and processed up to 200% faster than the previous system which led to an extreme increase in overall productivity and happiness for our fashion team. This project was highlighted in a quarterly demo by the company as an example of a successful cross-team effort in effective collaboration.
Admin site map
Example of early task flow to showcase how a contract is logged into the system at every touchpoint.
Design
The design for this project was heavily dependent on what the input of the tech team (for what was feasible) and the production coordinators (for what is needed). Because this was meant to be an MVP, many features that we initially designed for were not incorporated since the primary goal was to simply sunset the legacy ODB code base. The biggest pain point for design was the massive amount of input fields that were needed for data entry and finding a balance between a clear categorization of form field sections while making the interaction clear and easy– with users not having to save multiple times when switching views. I provided wireframes for the design. Overall, this was not a detailed UI project since it was for internal use only and we ended up using The Knot's branded blue as the only real visual color other than black and white. For UI elements, everything was directly taken from The Knot's pattern library so the heavy lifting was in the UX phase of the project. We went through two full rounds of wires and several iterations in between when dealing with partial sections of the product. How the design was ultimately affected was based upon user feedback from the internal project management team in user testing, feedback from the execution team in the China office, and technical feedback from the tech teams which limited design scope at times.
Early Wireframes:
Product detail page v1
product detail page, image tab v1
Screen flow for creating a new 'collection' in the database.
Screen flow for creating a new parent company entry.
Final Wireframes
Parent Company page final wire
Collections page final wire
Products Matrix - final wire
Company Page, collections - final wire
Company page, products - final wire
Company Page, photos - final wire