Project
Reed eCommerce
Role: Lead Designer
Timeline: 9 months
Reed Minerals is an abrasives company with solutions for blasting and roofing. They wanted to create an eCommerce platform for current Netsuite customers’ orders on Shopify. I was requested to lead this project due to my expertise in eCommerce and Shopify.
I was the lead designer on this project and relied heavily on my eCommerce and Shopify expertise to guide the project. The biggest pieces were building your own product, order and account management, and checkout. Since Shopify has a robust and easy checkout already, my biggest challenge was the build your own product flow.
UI
Reed requested a very minimal UI, since this way of ordering is very new to them and their customers (they were coming into this from phone calls and pen and paper!)
Build Your Own Product
To build the product, I created a step-by-step flow with a progress bar so users could visualize how far they were in the process. For the first selection, I kept the descriptions hidden so as not to overwhelm the user, and because most users would be already be familiar with the grade they needed.
I made sure to keep all selections visible at the top of the screen to reduce memory load on the user.
A review step with the ability to edit any selections before adding the product to the cart allows for any mistakes to be corrected before moving on.
Checkout
Checkout is standard Shopify checkout, with Reed’s branding UI applied.
Account and Order Management
Account management and order tracking are rolled up into one screen, common in eCommerce flows. One request from Reed was the ability to reorder the same order as before, so they don’t have to go through the product build flow every time once they know what they need. I included a reorder button on each past order, which leads to a review screen of the order information before adding it to the cart.
Results
We’re still in early days of the launch and gathering feedback from Reed’s customers, but Reed’s team is very excited to be stepping into the future. I’m anxious to hear how users will feel about such a big change!
Final Thoughts
I’m happy to have been able to use my expertise to bring eCommerce capabilities to Reed. I’m looking forward to continuing work on this project with more features and more robust UI.