MY ROLE
UX/UI Designer
DATE
Aug-Dec 2018
WHAT I DID
User Research
UI Design
Challenge: Establishing online system to generate sales and data management .
Yiminghui Food Factory is a traditional rice noodle manufacturer which serves the customers in the central part of Wuhan and surrounding cities.
I worked with them on this 3-month project to tackle the problems by creating a positive online experience. I did comprehensive user research to collect needs and pain-points, and then brought ideas to fruition after rounds of validation and iteration.
Some photos of Yiminghui Noodle Factory
User research to find problems and gather insights
I spent one-week gathering customers’ stories to understand how the factory works and who are their clients. Observe and interview methods was taken during the research and figured out the daily working process of Yiming Food
Research findings
By analyzing and synthesizing the data I gathered, I was able to get the heart of the matter and saw what the research was telling me. This led to four insights into the internal problems and two insights into the clients’ needs. These realizations helped me formulate what specific areas and problems my solution needs to target.
Internal Problems
Customer Needs
Persona
I created two personas reflecting the two main groups of clients I targeted at: old couples with low level of education and young independent entrepreneur.
Product proposal
After discussion, we reached an agreement that our goal is to establish a comprehensive customer and order management system, as well as an online shop, or we can say a useful ordering tool. Considering the development cost and user characteristics, we finally decided to develop a mini-app based on WeChat and build a CRM of our own.
The benefits of doing this are:
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Almost all Chinese have WeChat, which greatly reduces the cost of learning for our customers. Moreover, most of our customers are elderly people who lack network experience.
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Reduced development costs, mini apps provide a lot of interfaces according to different industries, the adaptation of Android and ios is also easier.
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The traffic on WeChat is huge, which is helpful for promotion and branding.
Since the front end uses a WeChat mini-app, the backend cannot apply any existing service platform, so we decided to design a management system separately.
One point needs to mention is that the Yiminghui does not want to make traditional e-commerce to expand sales on a large scale, because their products need to be delivered in time. According to the scale of the factory, it can only serve cities within 5 hours drive, which determines that the online store is not typical e-commerce, it’s more like a convenient tool to place orders
User Flow
After brainstorming, we identified two main features. One is to place orders automatically, the other is to top up. Auto ordering solves the problem of repeating and unscheduled order placement. The top-up function can help customers get better promotional prices, reduce costs, and greatly reverse the pressure on corporate funds.
Here is the basic user flow for placing an order.
Wireframe
After validating various concepts with participants and clients, their feedback led me to create and develop prototypes. For both internal management system and online shop. I went through 1 round of paper prototyping, 2 rounds of low-fidelity, and 2 rounds of high-fidelity. The low-fidelity prototypes focused on concept validation and simple usability. The medium-fidelity rounds were more concerned with testing usability and flow between screens. Lastly, the high-fidelity prototypes focused on content and visual design.
A low-fidelity wireframe of the internal management system
Medium-fidelity prototype of online shop
Usability Testing
During our medium-fidelity prototyping phase, the accountant、customer service、sales person and two of the clients participated in the usability testing. It consisted of 2 rounds with a total of 6 participants. For both rounds, we used Sketch and mocking both to create a clickable prototype that participants interacted with inside a web browser.
Final Design
For the CRM, I divided it into four modules——Client management, Order management, Product Management, and Data analysis. These four modules support sales person, customer service, product manager and finance separately.
All clients’ information is collected and then assigned to different sales persons by the manager. So the clients can still be reached even though sales person left.
Considering some clients may prefer the traditional way to make orders, the order list can be filtered by “Paid orders”, “Unpaid orders” and “No-order clients”. Customers service only have to call “no order clients” and add the orders manually. All orders list can be export into an excel sheet to double check with the generation and transport department.
For the last ten years, Yiminhui Food Factory has been focused on these four products and made a big success. They are planning to develop some other products. The card style makes it easy to understand their main products.
Daily orders ( both paid online orders and unpaid phone orders ) can be checked. Sales volume can be easily compared between products and sales areas. Sales performance is clear and all data can be export directly to support financial accounting.
In order to avoid customers who are outside the service area placing orders, we require membership certification before using the ordering tool, and at the same time, we get the member's WeChat contact.
Membership certification
Select "Auto order" option
Topup