Designing a Perfect-fit Solution for a Niche Industry
A modern commercial planting, growing, nursery operation requires complex process and operations management. Our team set out to design the solution that would solve their unique problems.
In order to fully understand a design problem of this magnitude, many stakeholder and user interviews were conducted to asess the functionality needed by real users, and the technichal constraints of their current solutions. Task mapping and user-flow exercises were helpful in this regard.
Wireframes were created in order to assemble basic clickable prototypes.
Throughout the project we needed to balance the density of data that can be displayed in traditional spreadsheet solutions, with the desire to make this application more user-friendly and easy to navigate. One solution is to create a multi-modal UI that displays panels of related information in a clear hierarchy. Typography, color, proximity, and iconography were all critical to achieving a usable interface, rich in information.
Inventory management and multi-stage process flows were re-used throughout the application.
My dashboard designs were templates for further technical exploration.
Another critical design problem was how to communicate all the design decisions to the front-end developers. As a developer myself I was able to create a fully-featured design system documentation system that gave code examples for all the UI components in HTML and CSS. Essentially we created a very thorough CSS framework that can be turned to for each design problem that will arise during development.
I was able to take the complex designs that were fully realized in the browser and wrap them in a modern Vue-based project architecture that cooperated fully with the needs of designers and developers.
This particular project offered me the challenge of finding and training junior front-end developers to use my design system for implementation. I prepared documentation and conducted many meetings to solve problems and conduct UX review of submitted work.
