Assignment
The CEO arranged a group of talented employees to make his vision of a product that’s a self-service online store builder in the Philippines. The objective is to allow SMEs to build their online store in minutes, providing an affordable means to expand their business operations online and reach a wider audience.
Timeline
This product was developed within a month-long hackathon and then iterated on by the team following an agile framework for further development.
Team
I worked alone as a designer with the developers, a scrum master to deliver the first version. More designers were assigned to help iterate on this project later down the timeline
Conception
I closely collaborated with the CEO and the dev team to determine the main objective of the platform and how we can seek to achieve that objective. We laid out user flows both for Multistore's Merchant Portal and its merchants' online stores
Branding
Most of my projects in Multisys start by making a logo for the product I'm assigned to design.
Merchant Web App
I created prototypes to demonstrate the core features that we will be building. This phase was highly iterative, a feedback loop with the team allowed me to refine my prototypes until I met all of the business and user objectives.
Design Audits
The design team conducted peer UX audits so we could improve Multistore's experience. Insights from these audits provided us with trusted objective feedback to improve our platform’s user interface and interactions.
Merchant Surveys
I released a survey to merchants to see whether we’re serving them well through the platform. The objective was to determine whether Multistore core functionalities provided our merchants positive user experience. We reached out to 30 of our merchants and here are the averages of the results
Signups
Multistore's initial launch went through in the fourth quarter of 2021. With the help of a local celebrity, we received a huge amount of signups.
User Retention
Because of a slew of bugs and technical errors encountered by our users, retention went down significantly over time.
Change of plans
Multistore ran operational for about 6 months (June 2022 to January 2023) before being shut down by the organization due to a shift in executive leadership, a huge overhead in operational expenses, and an exponential decrease of merchants because of failing systems implemented, specifically delivery courier integration.
Understand the Vision
The failure to grasp the product's vision will fail to provide an excellent experience to the users. The product’s tagline: “Build your online store in minutes” served as a north star while creating and improving the platform’s features.
Advocate for the users
There were numerous discussions about various features. It was my duty to question every directive that could compromise the quality of the experience, boldy advocating for users while maintaining business objectives has proven effective in delivering a great experience.
Polish and perfect
An unpolished user interface and bugs adversely affected the user experience, which in turn impacted product reception and retention. Great products take a good amount of time and planning to build.