Employer
Art.com
Role
UX/UI Design, Art Direction, Front-End/Back-End Dev
Year
2008
User Research
It was clear that some kind of mechanism was needed in order to ensure that this imaging project was delivered on time. With number of items to be imaged sitting at 100,000 and roughly 10 months to complete it in, I knew it was critical to maximize the output each day. It also became apparent to me that this work would not be completed on time without 2 shifts of staff working each day. This meant that the web application that I was going to build had to be robust enough to handle any issues while I was away from the office. It also had to be able to present information in such a way that it could be consumed by all of the Divisions that I was collaborating with - Merchandising, IT, and Operations.
Define
Information Architecture
I used a couple of my employees as “guinea pigs” to understand what their needs would be in a production setting. This helped in identifying use-cases for the web app as I moved forward with its design.
The scale of the project would also require large amounts of data to be moved around and updated. I collaborated with Merchandising to prioritize the images to be done and with IT to determine the best course of action to uploaded data and image updates to the production servers.
User Flow
There were a number of workflows identified during this phase of the design process. The 4 processes below are the most commonly used ones with “Overall Process” and “Item Processing” being the backbone of the entire system and essentially what the project consisted of day to day.
Ideate
Design Explorations
Despite this project being something that I initiated for my own use, I still felt that it would still be the best course of action to follow the traditional design process that I follow. I spent time to walk through various design solutions that would achieve the goals of the project that this application was created to support.
Validate
User Testing/Affinity Mapping
I once again had the benefit of leveraging my existing staff to test out the application for the incoming staff. I also gathered feedback from them on how best to train the new staff and to optimize the color correction process in a mass-scale.
I utilized a card-sort activity to make some final organizations of information related to status designations for the database, hardware selection, and finalizing key pages. I was able to see everything in one place and confirm that I had all the bases covered heading into the launch phase.
User Interface
Web Application Mockups
Default landing screen when users first come to the website.
Registration for those users who have no prior existing account.
After a successful login, the user is brought to this landing screen. It will have information pertaining to their own workload.
A management level screen that enables user to assign batches to different users and also view the status of existing batches already in progress.
Page to view contents of batch and make item-level updates.
Modal to view details of item.
Conclusion
The decision to design and build this application was a last-minute one, but the decision to do so enabled this project to succeed and to be delivered on time. In the end there just shy of 100,000 posters, art prints, and photos scanned and color corrected in a span of 10 months. This application also supported the training of 12 new employees and calibration of $50,000 worth of scanning equipment. These updated images helped Merchandising to launch a number of new products due to vivid visual representations of our products and accurate measurement data to help shoppers make informed buying decisions. These product expansions would contribute to revenue growth for many years to come.