Bangazon Inc., is a fictional eCommerce platform company used within Nashville Software School.
The goal of Bangazon is to become the most personalized, and most powerful commercial platform for individuals all around the globe. Nashville Software School "employs" its students to build all of the technology and tooling for the company.
Our UX Design Cohort partnered with a backend and C# cohort to design a dashboard system for Banagazon employees based on a list of 10 data endpoints.
For the first half of this project, our cohort worked as a whole to dive into researching and testing with users and pre-existing platforms and applications in order to create a fleshed out mock-up, using Figma as our prototyping tool of choice.
Timeline: 80 hours over 4 weeks
Role: Group Strategist Leader and UI Designer
Client: Bangazon (speculative)
Bangazon currently uses Google Docs to manage their administrative tasks related to employees and customers. Google Docs is not an integrated system, so there are often multiple and competing pieces of information, which results in poor customer service and employee relations. In addition, Bangazon is slow in response to replacing aging computer equipment and managing employee trainings. They need a better way to manage two important parts of their company: customers and their products, and employees.
How might we provide a centralized platform to track and manage Bangazon customer and employee information, making it easier for Administration to access and update information?
Based on the data end points we were given, we wanted to create a company dashboard with 2 main focuses:
1) Employee Management - including hiring, on-boarding, tracking laptops loaned to employees, and training schedule.
2) Customer Management - including customer information and purchase history, merchandise management, and sales.
Knowing now what subjects needed be covered in our dashboard we decided to look at other well known dashboard systems that are already in the market place today. Several came to mind, but we did not have access to most of them (Salesforce for example). But from using Shopify in the past, I knew I was able to set up a temporary account with fictional merchandise to explore the way Shopify organizing its customer's data and merchandise for sale.
We also looked into other design styles via Dribbble to collect other ideas of how we might prioritize subjects matter on either side.
After our research, we broke off into two teams, with my team focusing on the Customer Management side and the other team focusing on Bangazon Employee Management. My team of 3 then created two personas that encompassed our thoughts on potential users for the customer service side of Bangazon.
First we created a site map, followed by a journey map for our users on the customer side of Bangazon to get a better idea of what a typical user flows would look like for each of our personas.
Points we took into consideration:
- What problems would our customer service team encounter on a daily basis?
- What were the main daily tasks for each of them?
- What repetitive flows did they go through and was there a way we could make these more efficient or narrow them down?
- How were issues communicated through Google Docs or other tools?
- With their current workflow of Google Docs - where were they running into road blocks?
- What workflows could be implemented to make their daily tasks more efficient?
After talking through the current user flow and gathering insights we collaborated with the Employee Management side on ideas on how to structure Bangazon as a whole and decide on what similarities that the two sides would have - such as the navigation side bar. Then, we started to narrow in on designs for the Customer Management side, starting with simple, rapid fire, paper mockups so that we could quickly get our ideas out on paper, do user testing and iterate our designs.
After conducting user testing with 10 different subjects by asking open ended questions, we narrowed down our design decisions to move onto prototyping.
For prototyping in Bangazon in Figma, we first created our design foundation that we would be used based off of our supplied Design System. Each of then took over a section (or data end point) and started designing based on everything we had compiled - LowFi mockups, collected user feedback, and our design system. Collaborating within one page in Figma it made it easy for us to communicate with one another and share our ideas, thoughts, problems.
This was my first large group project involving many other UX designers and backend developers. It taught me a lot about the working through the UX/UI process on a team:
- Keep an open mind; in the beginning everyone thought they had the better idea. I enjoyed sitting back and listening to and watching everyone else's ideas come together. My favorite part was piecing together bits and pieces from each person's idea to create a collaborative new idea. Really paying attention and listening to your coworkers will make the entire process move more efficiently and without as many issues.
- LowFi mockup every single step if possible; Where we ran into roadblocks was the fact we hadn't taken enough time to play out and think fully through each step a user would take, especially in the Orders section. We didn't discover this until we were prototyping and had to go back to quick mockups several times before moving forward.
- More steps than I had imagined; It's easy to take those simple pages within platforms such as login, search, etc., for granted. But those simple steps do a lot in the backend and get users from point A to B and are sometimes the most important features within an application!
To view more of the finer details of the coding side of this project, which we did get into a little bit to see how quickly we could actually build it (hint: not as quickly as we thought we would!), visit the team's Github repo here.
