TRADE PROSPECTS

Product that users can search for importers and exporters by company,
commodity, volume traded, country, and within a specific U.S. state, down to the zip code.

My Role

I was responsible for all the UI/UX design elements for the product; including but not limited to persona development, unified data selectors, visual map selector, interactive chart tools, usability and the overall product strategy.

The Challenge

Design a product that provides information on import/export data and includes detailed shipments, partners and company demographics. There was a secondary goal to design a consistent look and feel that would be carried over to other product lines.

Discovery & Research

Two main personas were identified through the customer interview process. Once the initial interviews were complete the entire team went to work - we had several brainstorming meetings based around the customers input and began designing the overall structure of the product. I started a very basic wireframe, this was shown at various stages to the interviewees to get their feedback on the base structure of the product. All in all the bulk of the feedback is what helped the development team and myself define a solid direction to go with the product.

Visual & Functional Design

Since so much of this product relied on selection and steps, it was decided that a left sided navigation would allow for more space to build out each step, everything was contained within one view and the user could immediately see the changes that were happening based on their choices.

I took plain import/export data, and made it engaging for the user. Functionality was added that allowed the user to take control of their data with drill down maps to see overall stats at a glance and interactive graphs so they could get their information quickly in a clean and professional environment.

Usability & Post Launch

The on-boarding process for this product was a gradual one, the product manager was able to add a few customers a week which allowed me to get quick feedback from users and address specific concerns right away. In addition to feedback I used Google Analytics to figure out which features were being used the most and based on those results, new enhancements were continually being developed to further improve the users experience.

Conclusion

During this project the development team and I worked very closely to figure out the best solutions to tackle some of the issues that arose during development. All of our hard-work and many brainstorming meetings were a success. The product itself was the fledgling in the overall product development plan and got rave reviews from the business side and from users. Other products in the division were designed with this product structure as the base.