Elastic Path • 2024 • shipped
Redesigning product creation so merchandisers launch faster, with fewer errors.
TIMEFRAME
2024 • 1 Quarter
ROLE
UX Research • UX Design
DOMAIN
E-commerce • B2B SaaS
TEAM
Product Manager • Developers • Tech Lead
TOOLS
Figma • ChatGPT • PostHog
What's Elastic Path?
An e-commerce platform where merchandising teams create, manage, and publish products for their storefronts.
What was the gap?
The legacy UI did not match how teams actually worked. Products silently failed to publish with no status visibility, quietly costing revenue and driving up support tickets. I led the end-to-end redesign of the product creation workflow.
What was my impact?
57% reduction in customer support tickets. 4 new customers acquired after the redesign. 12 new form and status indicator components adopted into the design system.
The Problem
The legacy UI didn't match how teams worked — and it was quietly costing revenue.
Uptick in unsolved support tickets
Products were not showing on storefronts and merchandisers had no idea why.
Complaints from the Sales team
A clunky UI was costing us sales. Prospects chose simpler tools that looked better.
Critical usability issues → losses
Behavioural analysis revealed the legacy UI did not support all teams — losing time and money.
The legacy product creation UI, annotated with the four critical issues below.
01
Nav bar gives the illusion of a streamlined process, but key fields are hidden — forcing users to hunt across pages.
02
Low-friction toggle that results in fatal changes.
03
Product Bundle is an entirely separate workflow hidden behind a toggle.
04
Page-level save gives the illusion that every change made to the product will be saved.
Research
Research revealed two very different merchandisers with the same blind spot.
Contextual inquiries, session observations, heuristic analysis, and competitor research gave us the full scope of the problem.
remote contextual inquiries
5 Zoom sessions to understand daily customer interactions with the interface.
user session observations
50+ behavior analytics sessions on PostHog to identify friction points.
heuristic analysis
Tracked and ranked issues based on criticality.
competitor analysis
4 competitors' CRUD processes analyzed to identify patterns and opportunities.
01 → Enterprise teams
Multiple collaborators per product across complex catalogs. Need: coordination, visibility, error prevention.
02 → Small business
One person does everything
Basic features, simple catalogs, no handoffs. Need: simplicity and reliability.
Different workflows, same blind spot: no visibility into whether a product would actually publish.
Solution
I rebuilt the workflow around how teams think, with product readiness visible at every step.
A ground-up redesign that maps each form to the team's mental model and surfaces status throughout — so nothing silently fails to publish.
01
Workflow-driven forms, no longer fragmented across pages
Form flows mapped to each team's mental model, so every step feels logical instead of arbitrary. New form components and a slide-out selector pull together a workflow that used to be scattered across pages.
IMAGE / VIDEO — NEW FORM + SLIDE-OUT SELECTOR
02
Live status with new indicator pills
New status indicator pill components show product readiness at a glance, so nothing silently fails to publish on the storefront.
IMAGE / VIDEO — STATUS PILLS
03
AI-assisted fields
Auto-generated suggestions cut manual effort and reduce errors on repetitive product fields.
IMAGE / VIDEO — AI SUGGESTIONS
04
Product-led onboarding
Contextual guidance surfaces key features and reduces early drop-off for first-time merchandisers.
IMAGE / VIDEO — ONBOARDING
05
A new side nav that keeps every team oriented
The redesigned side navigation gives pricing, sales, and merch teams one shared view of product completeness and readiness — no more hunting across pages for where work is blocked.
usability testing and impact
Validated with users: 100% task completion, 33% faster, and 57% fewer support tickets.
I ran cognitive walkthroughs with the sales team and existing merchandisers. Task completion time dropped, the SUS score jumped from 64.3 to 88.5, and the redesign helped win 4 new customers while adding 7 reusable components.
100% task completion rate
Every participant completed the core create-and-publish flow without assistance.
33% decrease in task completion time
Streamlined workflows cut the time it takes to get a product live.
SUS score: 64.3 → 88.5
Perceived usability jumped from below average to excellent.
IMAGE — USABILITY TESTING / KEY ITERATIONS
Key iterations from testing: richer notification context, and replacing icons and UI patterns that weren't working.
Reflection
My biggest lesson: making stakeholders care about the data mattered more than the data itself.
Presenting research is very different from making stakeholders care about it — getting engineers to expand scope mid-project took reframing findings around what mattered to them. Usability testing also surfaced broken back-end structures we'd never have caught otherwise, and reinforced that trust — built through status visibility and reliability — drove adoption more than any single feature.