Context
Pattern is an E-commerce accelerator that helps brands grow in global marketplaces. Predict, its internal software, provides data insights that help brands grow faster in E-commerce. I redesigned its Notifications feature to help brand managers at Pattern monitor and solve product issues faster and achieve growth of brand revenues.
* To comply with the non-disclosure agreement (NDA), some design process and design details will not be shown. Dummy data is used to present the design.
Business Background
Predict is a web-based application. Pattern is in the process of building a Predict’s mobile app. One major benefit is that users will be able to receive push notifications on mobile.
Problem Statement
The Notifications feature in Predict was not utilized. At Pattern, each Brand Manager has to manually monitor thousands of products’ performance. When product issues happen, they can go unnoticed easily and cause severe revenue loss.
My Role
UX Designer
Platform
Web & Mobile
Timeline
3 months
Design Question
How might we create a robust Notifications feature that will provide quicker insights into product issues, save monitoring time, and thus help brands achieve revenue growth?
Research
I had discovery calls with 8 brand managers to understand their core needs. These calls helped me set up key solution requirements.
Add 3 new product notifications related to common product issues happen on Amazon.com.
Make Notifications customizable to meet the different needs of brand managers’ work.
* Due to the NDA, I will name these notifications as Notification A, Notification B and Notification C to show the design.
User Persona
Based on research findings, I created a user persona Kimberly to help me quickly explain the values of Predict notifications to different stakeholders and keep user pain points in mind during design.
Wireframing
Interface designs contain 2 main parts: Notification Settings for customization and Notification Center to view all notifications.
Notification Center
A new mobile Notification Center to show all notifications.
After clicking one notification, users will be directed to the specific page or tab in Predict.
Notification Settings
Users can customize the location (push notification and email) and frequency (daily and real-time) of each product notification.
Set the frequency of Notification A to be daily and the frequency of Notification B & C to be real-time by default, as Notification A happens much more frequently than the other two.
User Testing
After creating wireframes, I set up 5 user testing sessions with Brand Managers to go through my design and ask follow-up questions.
Key Findings
Users want a more advanced customization. For example, they currently could customize to receive daily notification for Notification A, but they couldn’t customize to receive real-time push notification and daily email for Notification A.
Users want to see a hierarchy of notifications in the Notification Center. With so many notifications, they won’t have time to check each one, but want to make sure they won’t miss the priority ones.
Design Refinements
Show priority notifications on top and use red color to highlight them.
Use pickers to further customize the location and frequency of each notification.
Design Solution
No miss-out of product issues
Now brand managers like “Kimberly” can receive notifications of product issues with different priorities at the Notification Center. They can also mark a notification as read and edit settings of the notification they select.
Customize to fit different needs
Brand mangers can customize what notifications they want to receive and how frequent they want to receive. Customizable alerts enable them to best monitor product issues under different situations.
Responsive Design
I also designed the web version of Notification Settings.
Business Impact
Growth of Brand Revenue
Notifications enable brand mangers to identify and resolve product issues faster and there will be less loss of brand revenues due to unnoticed product issues in the future.
Insightful data for the future design of Predict
Based on the data of notification settings and page views, we can understand how often do users view certain tabs/pages and what notifications they want/don’t want. This will help us deliver a more useful Predict user experience in the future.
Reflection
It’s important to pay attention to accessibility. When designing interfaces, I noticed some accessibility issues in Pattern’s current design system. For example, some components have low color contrasts and fail to past the WCAG2 Color Accessibility test. I still fully utilize components from its design system for the consistency of design. But if I have more time, I will bring up my concerns and recommendations to its design system to my design manager.
Celebratory notifications and alerts are both important. For this version, we focused on getting users alerted of important issues for their work. But for the better utilization of notifications in the future, it’s also important to include celebratory notifications or other information that are valuable to people.
