Educents Seller Dashboard Redesign
Educents is a ventured-backed marketplace to help homeschool parents discover educational resources provided by a community of independent sellers and small businesses.. My role as a product designer was to conduct user research from our sellers, receive additional feedback on improvement from stakeholders and operations, create prototypes, and work with engineers to implement our MVP. Our business objective was to increase growth in organic traffic, which included increasing seller engagement and give them accessible tools to help them market their storefronts.
Winter 2016
In Collaboration with Product Manager,
Stakeholders, & Operations
Product Design, User Research
Time: 2 Months
Problem
Overview
We noticed the metrics for users using our current seller dashboard was declining, so for the next few sprints, we wanted to rethink how the sellers engage with our platform. We proposed to redesign the entire seller on-boarding process, making it easier for users to sign-up as sellers, upload their products, keep track of their income, manage their orders, educating them on the best use cases of our product, and giving them all the necessary tolls they need to become successful.
Our constraints included a limited timeframe on redesigning a whole new platform. We had to work with what we had and prioritize what needed to be changed.
Goal
Our business objective was to increase growth in organic traffic, which included increasing seller engagement and give them accessible tools to help them market their storefronts.
Research —
The Platform & Navigation
Design Sprint Overview
The product team held a design sprint to help the stakeholders and engineers understand the current issues we’re facing and define a goal for an initial solution: make the seller dashboard less overwhelming and easier to use with the tools provided. We discussed how our average seller would use our platform, through a verbal user journey, so everyone gets an understanding to their problems they’re facing at glance. During this session, we discussed feedback of the overall user experience from past user interviews and looked at what how our competitive products are solving the solution.
Card Sorting
We started with the card sorting exercise to dissect the 15 links within our navigation (located on the left side of the dashboard). We wrote down where each link currently takes you and it’s functions, to get an idea what is already built and where it’s living on each link. The problem we realized was there were too many links spread out within the navigation, making it frustrating to find what you need. Ex. Why was it necessary to have two “sales” links with different names? There was also no homepage dashboard. Your first call to action would be your list of products live on your store and gives you the option to upload more.
Information Architecture
We restructured and prioritize which pages were necessary to have and minimized the number of links as much as possible. Many of the pages were combined under one link. This also allowed us to prioritize the “call to action” within each category of links. Many of the main pages were either confusing to use or didn’t display much information. For this design sprint, we decided to focus on creating a homepage dashboard, so sellers can see their overview and weekly or monthly sales.
Within our first round: Home (Link) On-boarding: Account info, Store, Products
Manage: Buyer Q&AAnalyze: New shipment, Product Stats, Payments
Promote: Store Sale, Advertise & Help: FAQ, Email Support, etc.
8x8 Sketches
The product team and the stakeholders sketched out their potential UI sketches of the homepage of the seller dashboard, which surprisingly included many data visualizations, charts, and action items. This allowed us to come to a conclusion that our average seller would like to see their monthly sales at glance upon logging into the platform. The orange dots voted most popular for features, while the green dots were best overall. After voting, we all agreed to the initial and minimal design solution that was best for our average seller.
Competitive Analysis
The sprint included capturing our analysis on competitive products and gathering inspirational and informative examples of other products solving similar problems. We wrote down what makes these features successful, but also keeping in mind of their target marketplace.
Critique
At the end of this mini session, we had everyone vote the winning “prototypes”. Since not every idea is feasible and only fit some of the problems in context, we can at least eliminate options and identify potentially viable solutions to move forward with.
8x Wireframes
We required everyone to sketch eight of their initial solutions through wireframes and explain the features/functions and a quick overview of the user story within 15 minutes. This enabled us to hear the story on other people’s perspectives and generate many insight and potential solutions.
Research —
Seller On-boarding Process
User Scenario
Our solution to a successful on-boarding process was to make it less overwhelming and digestible. This user-flow also displays the user journey of how the user becomes a seller. The final destination would take them to their dashboard. This also contains information on additional aspects of the on-boarding process as a whole, including email triggers, empty states, and future ideas.
Prototype
We put together the popular-voted sketches and features and combined them to our final solution, while writing a description on each function. We worked with the engineering team to see the most efficient way to design and build the new on-boarding process.
User-Flow
Using current templates, we implemented our style guide to the final and approved wireframes. This also required creating a separate identity; still cohesive to the brand, but using a softer and more inviting tone. With our goal solution in mind (receiving minimum required information) we split the screen in three different sections: Basic Information (Store Name), Create a Product (Upload), and Payment (Verification).
Solutions
Landing Page
The initial step of the on-boarding process was creating the landing page and marketing the importance of joining the educational community. This required us to take some time researching how we can highlight the benefits of using our platform.The landing page follows: a call to action at the top, 3 benefits, featuring our new seller dashboard, 2 of our seller testimonials, social proofs (company logos), and a following CTA that takes you through sign-up.
Visual Design
I worked on the visual identity of this redesign. This included choosing the colors, making iconography and product-marketing illustrations, and designing all marketing assets.
