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E-commerce platform redesign: discovery & definition phase

E-Commerce

Discovery

Definition

* Unfortunately, since the project is confidential because of the client's contract, it isn't possible to share details about the design deliverables or client's name. If you have any questions about the process or any particular aspect of the project, let me know.

Role: UX Designer & Researcher

Project duration: 8 weeks

Industry: E-commerce (via Wizeline)

End-to-end UX research and design strategy for a multi-role sales platform used by sellers and distributors in México.

🧑🏻‍💻 4 UX designers + 1 UI · 📱 🖥️ Mobile & Desktop web

The challenge

The client had previously built a digital application, a platform enabling every physical sales operation to be performed digitally: order requests, product showcasing, distributor approvals, and more.

Despite wide distributor adoption, only one third of sellers were using the platform. The company approached our team to collaboratively design the next version, not only to increase adoption, but to reconcile requirements from four internal departments: Commercial, IT, Operations, and Marketing.

The core tension: distributors were already on board. Why weren't sellers? The answer wasn't obvious from the inside, and that's exactly where the research began.

Internal alignment validation

Before touching any design, we mapped the company's key stakeholders and conducted in-depth interviews with each one. Responses were color-coded and synthesised to surface the most prominent themes, creating a shared artifact that made internal disagreements and alignments visible across departments..

Interview questions included

What is your current vision for this project?
What kind of digital experiences do you have in mind?
Are there any technical limitations we should be aware of?
What business objectives does this platform promote?

The synthesis revealed two dominant themes across stakeholders: platform performance and user experience. It also helped our design team internalise the client's industry vocabulary before entering workshop facilitation.

Remote design thinking workshop

Adapted mid-project for fully remote delivery (COVID-19)

At the critical start of our workshop phase, the COVID-19 pandemic moved everything remote. Having facilitated distributed workshops before, we adapted quickly, establishing microphone etiquette, training participants on virtual sticky-note tools, and restructuring our information architecture exercises to work without a physical whiteboard.

Warmup exercise

Built team confidence with digital tools before any critical decisions were made.

Experience canvas (Atlassian)

Pre-filled from prior interviews; only blank sections needing alignment remained open for discussion.

Brand distillation

Participants chose images representing "a good day vs. a bad day" at the company, surfacing brand attributes through visual association.

Proto-personas

Three collaborative user profiles built from stakeholder assumptions, designed to be validated in the research phase.

Customer journey map

Chronological visualisation of all user interactions, used to identify the most critical touchpoints for redesign.

Risky assumptions mapping

Participants voted on the riskiest platform sections, based on the current sitemap and implied assumptions about user context.

User research

With a rich internal picture established, we moved to external validation. Ten real users who passed our screening criteria were interviewed by phone, each session lasting up to an hour, with moderators selecting questions on the fly to maintain natural conversation flow.

Patricia, Seller (proto-persona)

Field sales, submits orders to distributors while moving door to door

Key questions: Does she use the electronic order requests section? How does she capture orders for the distributor? Does she have reliable mobile data while in the field?

Key research findings

Platform performance

Was the most cited pain point, consistent with stakeholder perception and now empirically supported.

User experience friction

Appeared alongside performance as a primary barrier to adoption for sellers in the field.

Contextual constraints

(e.g. limited mobile data while moving door to door) surfaced as real risks previously assumed but unvalidated.

Concept testing

Before moving into design execution, we built an interactive prototype of a critical platform section, using hypothetical data to represent a meaningfully different experience without revealing any proprietary content. Users were told explicitly: "We're testing the platform, not you."

While the prototype was partial, findings were strong enough to extrapolate recommendations across the full platform:

Navigation

New navigation patterns were perceived as more comfortable and intuitive compared to the previous hierarchical structure.

Linear task flows

Completing operations in linear flows made the process noticeably quicker and reduced cognitive load.

Design execution

Given the platform's scale and an 8-week scope, designing screen-by-screen was not feasible. Instead, we chose a strategy that maximised impact: deep design of the most critical flows, paired with comprehensive style guidelines that could be applied by implication to every other screen.

Style tiles

Ground rules for every design component, color, typography, iconography, card structure, notification rules, the 60/30/10 space rule.

Information architecture

New site map per user role, with a collaborative prioritisation exercise to select the most critical flows for wireframing.

Annotated wireframes

Every design recommendation linked to a specific piece of evidence or strategy, research-to-design traceability built in.

Every screen recommendation was anchored to evidence, not preference. The design documentation made the reasoning visible for the client's development team throughout implementation.

Outcomes

The final presentation connected every design decision to a documented business need. The client's engagement throughout was high, and the Foundations project evolved into a yearlong design and development engagement, with Wizeline collaborating directly with the client's IT team to implement the full scope of recommendations.