[Website+Web app] Driving revenue for e-merchants through UX

Shipup is a New York and Paris based SaaS platform on a mission to transform post-purchase experience in e-commerce.

I've been working as a solo product designer for 2 different squads, working from discovery to delivery:

📓 Establishing action and research plans for problem exploration around new markets and opportunities in conjunction with corporate OKRs.

🛠 Facilitate internal workshops and external insight generation methods to ideate and prioritize opportunities in close collaboration with the PM and data engineer.

🤖 Establish success metrics, then prototype and test solutions with users and closely monitor KPIs to ensure initial goals are met.

⚛️ Enrich and maintain the design system and design guidelines in conjunction with the development team.

✍️ Documentation of methods, processes, results, tools - implementation of an insights library with Dovetail to facilitate the note-taking process in interviews and the restitutions and sharing of insights to internal teams.

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I was tasked with working on 2 discoveries that would help the company identify opportunities to drive more revenue on new markets—while still maintaining the product's quality on smaller delivery tasks. The company needed to be further in both the US market and the "Up-Market" — companies that have reached a certain size and ship many orders a month.

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I worked hand in hand with PMs of each squad to define product outcomes we wanted to see that would make sense compared to the business outcomes we were given by stakeholders. We identified key personas — marketing and ecommerce roles, since they were the ones with the most influence in an ecommerce company that we didn't focus on yet — to address and competitors in the field to benchmark, and I created research plans and led generative interviews with users in order to learn about this problem space.

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I held internal workshops and interviews in order to better understand the given problem, and make use of all the already existing data inside the company—since we're working in BtoB with merchants that are usually busy, interviews can get scarce. We used interview snapshots to get the main points across when sharing our interview results with stakeholders and engineers. They also proved helpful when we needed to tag everything inside our dovetail!

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Those interviews helped us gather enough insights about our users to create value proposition canvases for those personas, highlighting the needs and pains we could tackle to address them.

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Once we met enough users among our target, we had a clearer idea of the actual problem we needed to solve, and the metrics we needed to move inside our product in order to solve it. Talking to users and prospects taught us a lot, and the biggest takeaways we had were 

1. to focus on proving the ROI of our solution as it is a vital buying criteria for e-merchants when they consider saas tools

2. to help our merchants drive their repurchase rate since it's one of the metric they monitor the most, but struggle the most to have an impact on.

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We met with stakeholders and team members in order to define the effort we wanted to invest, ideate and prioritize solutions.

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We identified multiple solutions to test, but wanted to move on quickly in order to learn fast. We worked in fast sprints with our engineers to design and develop 2 small widgets to drive repurchase in Shipup, and created a "fake door" for a 3rd widget in order to estimate the willingness of users to try it out. We went through a dozen of user tests with a quick prototype, allowing us to learn how wich topics to focus—the point here was mostly to challenge the ideas themselves while identifying main potential problems within the user flow.

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We gathered the feedback, went back to the drawing board in order to improve the designs and test them out on a larger scale! We then entered the delivery phase, ensuring pixel-perfect quality through all use cases and stories. I also ensured we re-used components from the design system when possible, and made the design system itself evolve when needed.

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While we delivered first versions of those features to our users, the work is far from over on these topics. We then entered a phase of frequent exchanges with users and beta testers in order to be able to still quickly learn and iterate when needed. Following a continuous discovery approach, we still met with users to gather their needs and feedbacks, while monitoring key metrics we identified earlier in the discovery to estimate the success of our solutions.

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