An internal tool designed for KEF to centrally manage its global e-commerce operations across 17 regions.
Project Goals
Help E-commerce Operations Teams to unify and optimise the workflows across 17 sites, from routine content updates to synchronised product launch campaigns, ensuring agility and coherence in KEF’s digital strategy.
My Scope of Work
User interview
Conduct interview sessions with users to understand user scenarios and struggles.
Design system
Given that the business strategy may shift over time, a design system is required for scalability.
Wire-framing & prototyping
Visualise user flows to validate the design with stakeholders and align with cross-functional teams.
Usability testing
Identify issues in the early stage and increase fidelity based on the testing results.
① Background
As the company’s global footprint and product portfolio expanded, scalability challenges emerged.
Managing the e-commerce platform became increasingly complex, demanding excessive manual effort and labor-intensive processes that hindered operational efficiency. The duration of training sessions kept increasing. Eventually, the company decided to revamp the platform, by improving as-is user experience and adding new features including mass update, role-based access control, and task scheduling.
② Empathizing
In the early stage of this project, I conducted interview sessions with staff from different regional offices.
To understand their day-to-day use-cases and struggles, the interviews were designed to be semi-structured, including a task for participants to demonstrate how they use the legacy tool to perform their daily job.
The key questions include,
“What’s your role? What’s your work scope in the team?” “Walk me through your current work routines. What steps do you feel the most challenging and why?” “Describe a time when you caused delays or errors (if any). How did you resolve it?” “What aspects are you looking to improve with this new system?” ...
To understand their day-to-day use-cases and struggles, the interviews were designed to be semi-structured, including a task for participants to show how they use the legacy tool to perform their daily job. Through the interviews, I identified major user groups and their pain points.
User groups
Content Coordinator
They handle SEO and static pages, including blogs, seasonal campaigns and latest offers.
Inventory Coordinator
They perform inventory-related tasks, including update product information and manage product SKU.
Operation Manager
They oversee the the work streams of the global and regional digital platforms’ operation.
Common pain points
>50% users reported they felt frustrated looking at complex and clunky tables.
>70% mistakes happened when users were multi-tasking over various sites or languages.
Those who work offshore manually calculated time difference when launching a new product that shall be updated at specific time.
③ Design System
The primary target audience identified was college-educated and employed young adults. This demographic is shaped by a mix of ambition, social connection, and a continuous journey of self-discovery.
To ensure the new design resonating with their sensibilities and align with their life stage, yet still recognizable for those familiar with the brand, I conducted visual audit on SOL assets, and set the visual tone for SOL as follows:
Confident, dynamic, and engaging.
④ Solutions
Role-based access control & activity log
The new app empowers admins to define and customize roles and permissions for different users, such as SEO writers, regional sales executives and managers. All user activities are thoroughly logged within the system. The access control and activity logging prevent unauthorized modifications and help consolidate efficient collaboration and productivity across departments.
Minimize the risk of unintended actions and provide immediate remedies for errors
The system includes an auto-save feature that preserves a version history for each update, enabling easy restoration of previous edits. Additionally, the system requires users to input additional confirmatory information when irreversible actions are attempted, helping ensure critical operations are executed deliberately and cautiously.
Simplized workflow with mass import & scheduled publish
The research revealed that before updating content like product or SEO, users always create a spreadsheet containing all the item details, strictly following a predefined template. This structured data format inspired the system to be designed with a mass import function, capable of auto-retrieving and processing the data. To further streamline the workflow, the system allows users to schedule page publications for specific dates and times, facilitatiing efficient work even when users are operating from different time zones.
⑤ Impact
7 hrs -
The training sessions to onboard new staff was reduced by 7 hours.
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