My Role
I was one of 3 designers on the project and was responsible for UI and Interaction design deliverables. I worked alongside a Senior UX Designer who led the design strategy while a Design Technologist investigated and documented print processes and pipelines. Together we supported a R&D Pilots and Incubation team consisting of marketers, engineers, and product development managers.
The Challenge
In order for Print Service Providers to mass produce serialized marks for production, we needed to create an enterprise level solution that enabled this capability while integrating with existing printing, manufacturing, and supply chain pipelines. The goal of the project was to design a web portal to generate large volumes of marks and seamlessly transition these marks into existing print production workflows.
The Problems
1. Print service provider workflows and product lifecycles are very complex, how can we understand them better?
2. How can we organize products in our system in a manner that matches print service provider content management models?
3. Print production tasks such as re-orders can be repetitive, how do we make this quick and easy for the user?
Understanding Complex Workflows and Product Lifecycles
Through research including interviews with subject experts, site visits, and gathering information through documentation, we built an understanding of the general process involved with a products' lifecycle.
We created an experience map to show how different user types would interact with the components of the platform from order creation, through printing, and onto the end consumer. This also helped a lot to point out where the unknown answers were and where more definition was needed.
Organizing to Match Print Product Management
Armed with a better understanding of high volume print manufacturing, we dove into the details of account structures and content management models to match the organization of printed products and how orders of print runs are executed.
We created wireframes, starting with the major tasks the users would go through using the portal: Order creation, order management, and viewing/editing orders.
Simplifying the Steps to Fulfill Orders
Since the order of marks and print runs are a repetitive cycle, we wanted to eliminate unnecessary steps and make the path to completing orders as quick and seamless as possible.
We worked with our development team to create a styleguide and component library. This ensured consistency in the design and made development easier having reusable components to build off of.
Final UI designs of product line list, product summary, and product creation screens
The Outcome
The portal went from a proof of concept to a full fledged platform capable of producing large amounts of serialized marks in parallel to large volume print production workflows. Eventually the portal would scale to support several large brands and print service providers, creating millions of uniquely identified products a year.