Designing an e-commerce platform to help a friend scale his business, reach more customers and expand the community.
An old friend reached out to me to help make sense of his plans for his business. He simply wanted an e-commerce website designed to suit the peculiarities of his current operations. He had also built a small community around his business and was thinking of merging it all.
The major constraints, however, with working in this kind of setting were the short timeline, and the tight budget.
We decided the product would work best as a Progressive Web App. This would help us leverage the flexibility of a web page and smooth navigation of a mobile app, and scale perfectly across all devices.
When approaching the visual design, I opted for a clean fresh look that emphasises product photography and gives a nice feel to the shopping experience. In designing the user experience, it was very important to focus on how easy we could make it for the customers to find and buy or order products they need.
The shopping experience was one where we could really innovate around and test new ideas. However, we chose to stick with convention, using Jakob’s Law of UX as our defense.
We digitised the good sides of the offline shopping experience and added a feedback system where the customers can suggest products they don’t find, get notified when a previous unavailable product they are interested in becomes available, and make custom orders.
The main business goals were to make sales and satisfy our customers. The customer’s device was definitely not going to hinder these sacred goals. Hence, the decision to design a web platform that scales beautifully on any smart device.
Building a community around your business is a great way to scale, give back and boost sales. The customers get to connect with, ask questions about bugging issues and learn from experts in their field.
I felt the most excitement while working on this part of the app. It represents what I love most about the internet; the ability to connect people and the power of the network effects.
This project gave me the freedom to play with some design concepts and elements I have always wanted to play with. While designing, I noticed a dearth of solid ideas; this was mostIy because I got started immediately with designing the product, and skipped the research phase.
The MVP of this product is currently in development, I'm excited to see how it turns out.
