Frontend - Online Store Manager
Shogun, 2021-2022
The product manager on the Storefront Squad identified and prioritized the need to provide users with the ability to create, update, and revert to various versions of their online store. I took these requirements and helped to further define the problem, scope down the work, executed on visual design, and worked with engineers to polish the final product.
Context:
Work project
Duration:
2 months
Role:
Sole product designer among devs and product manager
Tools:
Figma, Figjam, Miro
Problem
Users did not have the ability to create, update, or revert to different versions of their online stores.
This led to our users experiencing friction during the planning and launching of flash sales and the loss of potential revenue as a result.
What kind of friction were store owners experiencing and why?
While we envisioned the Site Manager as a versioning tool, there were clear limitations to the product including:
- Online store owners cannot preview multiple store versions simultaneously
- Online store owners have to rely on support and dev team to revert online store versions
- There is no automated process for launching store updates
Our Goal
Our goal was to create a differentiated feature that would make Frontend appealing, activate people and their teams, and ultimately retain them in the long-term.
Previous Designs
The current workflows available to the user were born of compromise. They addressed the core needs of users while minimizing the engineering lift required to implement the workflow. As such, the current workflows had plenty of room for improvement.
Constraints
As with any project in the real world, our team had to work with several constraints for this project that we had to take into consideration while creating a hypothesis.
🚧
Some designs could not be developed immediately because of tech constraints
Beholden to the design patterns and decisions of the existing platform
Brownfield
Tech
⏰
Unable to conduct generative research or usability testing before deploying
🖥️
Time
Hypothesis
A hypothesis was formulated to aid in creating solutions for the problem space at hand.
We hypothesized that helping online store owners reduce their labour hours when launching new sales campaigns, would reduce the cost of converting new customers.
Design Decisions
Scheduled Publishing
Introduced a scheduled publish feature that helps users set up sales campaigns in advance.
Simplified Steps and Inputs
We removed all steps that weren’t necessary to publishing a new store version and introduced features that would save users from having to use costly development resources.
Multiple Preview Instances
A simple CTA was inserted into each store version row in the Site Manager to allow the user to preview any version at any time.
Measures of Success
To determine the validity of our hypothesis, I came up with several metrics to measure the impact of the designs to be created. If these metrics improved, we could be confident that hypothesis aligned with the value that users wanted to derive out of the Site Manager flow.
✅
Labour hours saved during website launches, updates, and reverts
Helping out clients reduce labour hours will make our platform more attractive.
Customer Sentiment
Time Spent on Task
🎟️
Number of support tickets submitted before vs. after redesign
💪
Support Tickets
Impact
After the redesign was implemented, the number of store versioning support tickets dropped by 68.4%, meaning users were spending less time coordinating with our support team to launch a new version of an online store.
🎟️ Support tickets
A look at store versioning issue related tickets per month for a specific store.
-68.4%
Tickets per month
Decrease in tickets
Impact
Redesign
38
Tickets per month
12
Previous
Though we had not been tracking the number of labour hours previously, we've found that the labour hours related to launching a new version of a store after the redesign was around 21 hours/launch on average. Based on the amount of support tickets we were dealing with that were related to new store versions previously, we can assume that the average labour hours per launch have decreased.
💪 Labour hours
Reported by specific stores.
21
Tickets per month
N/A
Previous
Redesign
Tickets per month
When polling our users after the redesign, we noticed a 22.58% increase in our NPS score. Although making it easier to manage online stores has provided value to our users and has contributed to raising our NPS, it is important to note that several updates to the platform were made (such as user management and CMS upgrades) when we most recently polled our users.
✅ Validating Hypothesis
Reported by specific stores.
+22.58%
Net promoter score
Increase in NPS
Impact
Redesign
62%
Net promoter score
74%
Previous
Why does this matter?
Making changes to the platform that provide additional value to our customers increases activation on the Frontend platform and helps our customers increase their conversion rates. Both are goals for the Storefront Squad.
Key Learnings
Rapidly validate and prioritize features that fulfill deep user needs
Limited resources made it imperative for the team to identify opportunities for the user and the business and to focus on features that will provide the highest impact for users
Clearly define your measures of success even if you’re unable to track them at the start
There wasn’t a way to track all the required KPIs in the beginning, but we found it important to set up the product so that we can surmise improvements from any data that we are able to obtain.
