Overview
I was tasked to redesign, reorganize and prepare a design system for a B2B platform that integrates as a plugin into a variety of e-commerces, giving the user the ability to receive Bitcoin payments. The platform had a dashboard section, a wallet search function and an invoice generator.
The Outcome
Refactoring the whole platform (a lot of UI, a little bit of UX)
Refactoring outdated products is no easy task since loyal users keep using them for a reason. But with orderly and renewed designs we can still make the users make the best use of the tool. I prepared a Design system for developers to fix consistency across the platform, gathered insights thanks to general analytics and made use of heuristics and industry standard components to improve the product in a traditional way. I also worked with the marketing team to implement growth strategies and added an onboarding to the account creation.
The process
Overview and diagnostic
The first job of a designer is always to swim in the context of their product, learn as much as possible about the tool at hand, its goals, as well as the owners and users behind it. I started making heatmaps and analytics report to see beyond what only my eyes can see.
Goals & Scope
Alongside stakeholders we decided what the major changes of the platform would be and why, what our limitations where and how we could work through them. I prepared a roadmap and had a chat with developers to understand their technologies better. I also prepared a list of things we could work on.
Design system
With developers, we decided to use Tailwind CSS to pave an easy way for us to work with styles and code. I prepared a figma file with the necessary components and tokens, normalizing all the different uses I found across different sections of the platform.
Testing, experimenting and refactoring the platform
We started with minor testing and differential A/B tests to upgrade the UX, while the developers worked on the components after everything was approved. We added an onboarding to the platform and worked guides with the marketing team so the plugins could be better understood and installed.
Conclusion
To have a good design is to have a good conversation. This is something that needs to come out of the culture of the company behind the product. Good communication allows for faster and better improvements. Understanding what already works and deeply searching the why it works allows us to settle into the context and perform according to the needs we have at hand for both the users and the business.
There’s no need to change what already works
There’s no need to change what already works
Working closely with developers is key to facilitate speed
When something doesn’t work, it’s ok to break stuff and experiment
Working closely with developers is key to facilitate speed
When something doesn’t work, it’s ok to break stuff and experiment
