The Online Stores project was new territory for Custom Ink. This was the first time in the history of the business that we would market a new product built from the ground up. We created a series of applications that would enable our sales representatives to demo stores to prospects more efficiently, help location managers organize their deliveries, and supply our buyers with a seamless checkout experience.

This was our opportunity to be an askhole. Our biggest challenge as a team was reaching our goal of 50 stores within 3 months. This was a huge challenge because it took our internal users 1-3 months to get a store set up and live for a customer. Asking why led us to discovering new problems that we were unaware of in the beginning.

Through user interviews, prototype testing, and market analysis, we identified an array of pain points that our internal and external customers were experiencing. We took those insights and began to strategically map out long term and short term solutions for our products.

I set up a lo-fi clickable prototype using InVision to help aid the customer conversations and also provide usability insights. With close collaboration with the engineering team, I was able to simplify the complexity of the product and make the flow more comprehensible.

This is where the magic meets reality. The goal here was to fill one pothole at a time. After presenting these design directions to the engineers and leadership, our next step would be to do a soft-launch of the components and see how our users would respond.