Case Study
Established in 1999, Sweatband.com has been selling sports and fitness products for more than twenty years. Using expertise gathered over that time they began manufacturing their own products that improved on common industry faults.
Team
Robert Cade
UX Lead, Strategy, Project Manager
Karen Kim
Marketing Manager
My Role
Product Design
Discovery Research
Strategy
Ideation
Prototypes
User Testing
The Challenge
Sweatband.com manufacture their own products. They needed to track what products were ordered and when they are due to arrive. This was historically done on spreadsheets for many years but due to recent growth is no longer feasible. This method of tracking orders took up the majority of one of the senior manager’s time.
The goal was creating a tool that would allow the business to track orders and allow the senior manager responsible to work in other parts of the business.
Minimal Design
Responsive Design
Creative Idea
Creative Methods
The creative process is different from project to project. The approach is determined by contexts such as the goal, the end-user and other similar variables.
Before doing anything else I take the time to see how a task has been handled in the past.
I speak to people who use the existing method and observe how they handle it. This reveals the important steps and steps they wish were in place. It also reveals how the current solution breaks down at a larger scale.
MVP definition
A product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the product development cycle.
User Testing
the process of collecting information about usability and overall user experience from actual users during the design process. This is done through a variety of user testing methods.
User Personas
Personas are archetypical users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users.
User research & Analysis
Helps us identify and prove or disprove our assumptions, find commonalities across our target audience members, and recognize their needs, goals, and mental models.
Product strategy
By defining every aspect of the user experience before initiating the design phase, you’re giving your team direction for all aspects of the design.
Hi-fidelity Prototypes
Sprint planning
Hypothesis Phase: This initial gathering of raw data helps to define our strategy & research plan. We gain a clear understanding of the problem we are to solve and are able to apprise stakeholders. This means that all involved are on the same page before any significant work takes place.
Research Phase: In the next step, we evaluate the current process. We identify gaps, redundancies and friction points to help the team prioritise major areas of opportunity.
Design phase: The final phase (before being presented to stakeholders), was to have our strategy inform a multi-phased project roadmap. Paramount to this, were methods for tracking success, as well as agreeing milestones.
Personas
Why use personas?
Personas help designers to create understanding and empathy with the end users. Thanks to personas designers can hold the end user’s perspective in mind.
Multiple Users
Products and systems often have multiple users. Each user will have their own way of using the product and for their own reasons. Personas help keep requirements relevant and may also help identify alternate usage scenarios. In short, they can keep the purpose of the project clear.
Requirements hierarchy
Having clear goals for development allowed requirements and features to be prioritised by user. While considering the MVP we were able to include the functionality needed by all end users.
Synchronicity
The personas helped the team to maintain a single direction. Any suggestion was filtered through the lens of questions like, “Would this be useful for Beatrix” or “How will this affect accounting?”
Lo-fi Prototypes
Lo-fi prototypes or wireframes are quickly made visuals to illustrate the rough layout of proposed solutions.
Here we go into more detail. The elements have more context and show how they might function if they are included in a live page.
DESIGN + PROTOTYPING
The Result
I worked with the team and stakeholders every step of the way. The team and I were able to assess what was feasible and define the MVP. As lead designer, I was able to design a solution that would automate the data processing previously done manually. The user could then focus on choices and would check the order before it was placed.
This resulted in the primary end user no longer manually managing orders and the secondary end user having all corresponding financial data readily available.
- Freed processing manhours – 80%
- Order visibility increase – 77%
- Proactive customer service – 85%