A comprehensive product overhaul for growth
How I designed a sleek intuitive experience for supply chain management SaaS Flowls from their deep understanding of user needs
DELIVERIES
Intuitive & simplified interface
Below is a summarized overview of my work in low resolution, as I'm unable to enter details due to a non-disclosure agreement.
Some of the 50+ interface screens I designed
SCENARIO
A product that cuts bureaucracy
— MY ROLE
Product Designer
— TEAMS INVOLVED
Product
Development
— PERIOD
May – Dec 2022
(8 months)
— TOOLS
Figma
Miro
ClickUp
Agile
International trade management in Brazil is basically predicting deadlines within a sea of documents, approvals, delays, tax, laws, using Excel sheets to control everything. Insane manual work.
Two automation engineers understood the urge to modernize supply chain management and created a SaaS that integrates players and processes automatically. Importers, exporters, transporters, law firms access documents, dashboards, and updated data in one huge hub in the cloud: Flowls.
The product closed a deal with a major importer, kicked Excel to the curb, and secured its inaugural round of investment within a major business incubator.
PROBLEM
An MVP that can't scale
When founders coded the platform themselves, they knew it had an expiration date. They were no developers, so the MVP would only run until the first client traded Excel for Flowls end-to-end.
A large importer jumped in and technology soon fell short. It was time to scale the product and prepare for the next round of clients and investors.
They needed a designer to rethink the experience based on the new learnings and create a fresh interface. So I stepped in.
SOLUTION
Building a smooth product
Product was being rebuilt from scratch: server, information architecture, scrapers, back-end, front-end. When I arrived, interface had just started to be created, and needed a professional push to move faster.
The Product Manager had an amazing knowledge of what users actually needed and that set the basis to design a groundbreaking new experience. He knew exactly what they wanted.
I crafted a new interface along 8 months, one feature at a time, through a continuous process with the team:
1. Planning
I had an intro discussion with Product and Project managers to understand the feature, where it fit the business goal, the flow, what user needed to accomplish and the desired outcome.
2. Mapping the current experience
Together we mapped the flaws, shortcomings and wishes for every feature – which helped me tremendously to understand requirements in detail and plan what to do objectively in a very short amount of time.
3. Designing the new user experience and interface (UX/UI)
Then I sketched the new flows, screens, widgets, and dashboards to looked more fluid and intuitive, iterated the designs in detail with Product and Project managers, and prototyped when approved.
4. Handover to front-end and back-end developers
At last, we gathered front-end and back-end teams on a handover meeting to present the new screens, explain why they were designed that way, how they addressed user needs, clarify technical details, and answer questions, and thus minimize the chance of misunderstandings and errors.
This process ran smoothly within teams and Flowls got a brand new interface that perfectly fit user needs and the new technology, ready to reach new clients and seed new investors.
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