OjaExpress - RETAILER APP
Vanika is an online high-end business tool developed by OjaExpress to promote cross-cultural online grocery shopping. OjaBI helps grocers sell their goods online effortlessly. This initiative was undertaken to support small, ethnic local grocers with no digital presence to increase exposure. Vanika offers vertical integration to decrease cost and increase productivity.
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Project Overview
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CHALLENGE
Vanika was started to give small-scale business owners an easy way to maintain inventory online. Small family-owned stores don’t get an opportunity to work with big distributors, they generally have poor record-keeping and lack a proper inventory management system.
Vanika was designed as an all-access portal that helps distributors and suppliers work seamlessly.
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GOALS
1. Implement a Design Process
2. Improve usability across the platform
3. Establish a standardized design kit
4. Establish a standardised Design System
ROLE
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Product Designer
Product Strategy, Visual Design, Prototyping and Testing
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TIME
July 2020 - Ongoing
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TASK
Design a Business Intelligence tool for grocery distributors and retailers
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TOOLS
Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe XD, Procreate
Design Process
EMPATHIZE
Retailers have limited buying power. Most of the time their order volume isn’t high enough to place an order with the distributors. They are often forced to indulge in group ordering activities which they’re not always comfortable with,
Manual phone calls and paper methods are the norms.
This results in:
1. Paper invoices
2.No tax maintaining tools
3. Poor inventory management system
4. Products are bought in a very ad-hoc manner from smaller suppliers
5. Delivery cost is high
6. Managing ordering is difficult
7. Frozen food is difficult manage
With the existing distributor relationship, the Retailers don’t get bulk discount prices.
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MARKET RESEARCH
Understanding the users of OjaExpress
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USER INTERVIEWS
In an attempt to understand the needs of the user we recruited and contacted a few distributors and retailers. The interviews were conducted virtually through zoom.
By asking open-ended questions I understood how the relationship between distributors and retailers works, their current business scenario, the tools they’re familiar with etc.
This helped me form a general idea of:
- What works well today
- Opportunities for improvement
- The ideal state
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INTERVEIW EXCERPTS
"Publishing the product catalog onto the website is always a time consuming process"
"Frozen produce is the hardest it needs to go fast, so updating inventory gets tricky"
"Usually all the invoices are handled at the end of the month, we still use paper, it can get very messy - but I haven't found an alternative that works"
"A clean and easy way to keep track of inventory that's something I look forward to"
"Maximizing the delivery time and pace is most important for me, I would prefer my truck full"
"All orders are taken via phone, we sometimes do miss a few products that way"
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EMPATHY MAP
I decided to use an empathy map to synthesize all my research findings from the user interviews. This led me to discover few key insights and helped me uncover some key patterns.
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WAYS TO IMPROVE
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Understand new product offerings and increase engagement
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Understand how I can get people interested in a particular cultural grocery type and connect to a set of grocers that can serve them
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Product recommendations to increase margins
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Featured products, marketing within the product
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Analytics are key, product recommendations based on big sellers
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Simple is meaningful - revenue, margins
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Printable reports
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Summary of orders - simple
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Integrated with POS - more in-depth data, start with pulling from PoS but could be two-way
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Comparisons to others in your area, nationally
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Reporting by community groups/store types
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We want to be the brains of their business, business intelligence tool
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Culturally appropriate, translation buttons
USER PERSONA
Based on all the interviews I conducted I created a user persona.
Defining Problems
DEFINE
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PROBLEM STATEMENT
After identifying my target user, I had to understand the problems which I’d aim to solve. To define the problem statement I made use of the insights that I’d gained before.
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PROJECT GOALS
To narrow down on the features that we needed to implement, I clearly defined the goals that we are trying to meet.
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SITE MAP
Based on the research findings I created a list of pages and add-ons our website would feature. Oja had a large assortment of pages that needed to be designed. I also had to map and put the pages carefully, making sure the users would find it easy to navigate throughout the site.
Ideating Solutions
IDEATE
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SKETCHES
After deciding on the user flow and the site architecture for the community, I started sketching out a rough design for the screens. The sketching was based on the design patterns I found while researching similar sites.
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WIREFRAMES
Once basic sketching was done I had a fair idea about where each element of the screen would go. To present my idea to the stakeholders I developed some medium-fidelity wireframes. To make the layout responsive and fluid I worked on the different screens simultaneously.
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UI DESIGNS
Since I already had a style guide that I had created for OjaExpress, I kept that as a guideline and came up with the following visuals.
PROTOTYPE DEVELOPMENT
PROTOTYPE
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DESKTOP PROTOTYPE
I made a simple prototype of the screens that I'd designed on Figma. This prototype was used to present to team members and stakeholders to get early approval. I also used the prototype for usability testing to get early validation from users.
USABILITY TESTING
TEST
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USABILITY TESTING OBJECTIVES
The same participants used in the initial research process were brought back for testing with the following as the major objectives:
1. Test to see of the users are able to perform the tasks in a satisfactory manner
2. Observe users' interactions with the product
3. Assess areas of improvement for future iterations
Reiterations
& Next Steps
To keep monitoring the trends in the food industry particularly the grocery side. To see if any changes impact the distributor retailer growth. To gather data on Vanika's usage, to understand how users are interacting with the product.
TEST TEST AND MORE TESTS!
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โ๐ผ
1.Design Version 1
These are the very first designs we've come up with for Vanika. Tests will be conducted and changes will be made accordingly for Vanika 2.0
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2.Design Handoff
The Designs have been finalized, documented and handed off to production.
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3.Product Launch
The product has been launched and is currently being used by several retailers and distributors.
