ZanTech is a management platform developed for online sales enterprises and individual merchants.
This is an optimization project of user experience for a back-end system which mainly offers service to business users(e.g. different merchants). As a B2B project, ZanTech mainly focuses on helping businesses of different scales manage their online stores, monitor their daily data, and analyze customers, etc. This product initially consists of five modules: stores overview, customer analysis, advertising and promotion, digital price tag, and data export. ZanTech is a background system developed by the department for business configuration, which is convenient for different merchants to configure the store's goods, activities and operations on variant platforms, such as on their mobiles or PC or tablet PC.
In this project, compared to an exquisite interface design of the general products which targets to individual customers, ZanTech pays more weight on the design of user experience and the completeness of system functions. In order to ensure merchants use this system to better manage their online stores, this project primarily adopted Agile approach for development. In the process of development, designers created an incremental and iterative design of this product. Based on users' timely feedback or new business requirements, there will be more function/management pages added to this system. For example, in the holiday promotion, there would be a new page to specifically configure stores' advertisings.
Business goal. The project has two primary goals that need to be achieved. Firstly, it aims to enhance the accessibility of ZanTech in order to increase users' frequency of interaction. This improvement will make it easier for users to access and engage with the platform. Secondly, the project seeks to integrate all management functions into a single system, which will contribute to improving users' retention. By consolidating various management functions, users will have a more streamlined experience and find it more convenient to navigate the platform.
Target user group. The target user group for this product primarily consists of businesses and individual merchants who operate their online stores on the shopping platform of JD.com. These users are the main focus of the project and their needs and preferences will guide the development and design process of the product.
This is the basic requirements(as showing below) from the product owner. There were already one version realized before I took this project. That is, the basic design and functions of ZanTech has been developed already. The main objective at that time was to optimize the user experience, such as integrating and unifying the design of all ends of ZanTech.
The target group of this project included enterprises and merchants who were running online sales via the shopping platform of JD app. The team obtained the primary business appeal through analyzing the target group. First, on the side of users, the team aimed to improve users working efficiency, make it easier to manage their business data, and reduce the input cost in a way. Then, for the owner of this product, developing and optimizing this product mainly could increase users' stickiness, enhance users' activity, and maintain revenue growth on the shopping platform.
The team mainly adopted Agile method to the whole developing process. Since this product would update irregularly depends on users' feedback, changes of the market, and specific activities, etc.
Since the first version of the user feedback did not achieve the expectation of this product, the department decided to optimize the product.
In the session of user research, to understand the pain points of users, I participated the diary study and phone interview with the product manager, and conducted the acceptance test. Accordingly, we got four important problems of the user experience related which needs to be adjusted and optimized are listed as following.
1) The rate of data exporting is lower than we expected.
2) Some users mentioned that they felt confused because they see some empty pages sometime.
3) The design inconsistent exists among different platforms/ OS.
4) Functionally, there was certain chance that the profile picture or users' name can not be accessed.
For the qualitative data, I did thematic analysis to look for patterns in the data. By reviewing the results of user research, I developed user experience goals and objectives. It turns out that the reason of low rate of data exporting is most likely affected by reports cannot be customized. And by communicating with our programmers working on different platforms, I determined the key point of solving the design inconsistent. Moreover, in the perspective of the user, I understood the user's confusion through observing the acceptance test. There was no clear indication to tell users what is going on.
Therefore, I sorted out the solutions to these problems extracted from the current version of ZanTech. And then I implemented these solutions in my design to complete this optimization.
1) To make the data report customized.
2) To unify the design style.
3) To make special design for specific situation.
For this project, there were three essential objectives of the design process, which are to make the task flow smoother for users, to enhance the interface affinity, and to present a clearier hierarchy of information. Therefore, I added various states of data visualization to make these business data statistics more customized. Compared to the old version which only presents data in one state. That is, now the new design supports users to define different fields for their data report. Therefore, users can use this product to export a data report with different fields about the data in their online stores(e.g. only showing people flow or showing people flow, customer flow and the amount of membership).
As you can see figures below, which are the final design of the optimization.
Mobile Version
In addition, the interface assets had been unified and standardized to be reusable which improves the efficiency of operation and also ensures the possibility of cooperative work.
There are pages of data analysis below, mainly used for the regular monitoring and statistics of customer flow.
In addition, there are three types of empty states added to this product.
This project was the first relatively complete project I participated in during my internship. I have had a preliminary experience of how to contribute in a team as the role of UI/UX designer. On the other hand, I did not have too much direct contact with users, and the participation of users in the design process was not deep enough. I was more focused on design instead of trying to do sufficient user research before proceeding to design. I would put more effort on how to improve user's experience in a more practical and realistic way. Moreover, I did not have sufficient preparation before getting down to design. For example, to understand the initial wireframe more thoroughly.
I was working on this project until I finally left the company. In the end, the platform has more and more functions, which resulted to the operation becomes very tedious. Moreover, there were some similar functions repeatedly developed on different platforms, while these platforms in same project. For the future development of this product, first, these platforms could be integrated together on ZanTech to make sure that there is only one comprehensive platform to deal with all managements. And then, a specific place/page should be considered to store the data from some time-sensitive activities which possibly would be taken down after certain period of time.
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