Who is Gooten?
Gooten is a technology-driven print-on-demand company that enables small to enterprise eCommerce stores to easily design and sell custom-designed products. They partner with a global network of manufacturers, offering items from apparel to home goods, to fulfill orders and deliver products directly to customers.
The Strategy
Gooten's users sought reliable product quality and a seamless shipping experience to effectively manage customer expectations. ,Achieving this proved challenging for Gooten due to the integration of multiple vendors for a single product. Moreover, the process of launching new products lacked consideration for the end customer experience. There were inconsistencies in product quality across vendors, unpredictable shipping costs, and a less-than-optimal approach to vendor selection, primarily based on tiered lists rather than factors such as shipping price, product quality, or delivery time. By collaborating with my team, we concluded an internal ERP (Enterprise Resourcing Planning) system was needed to manage products launched on Gooten's product catalog.
The Approach
Understanding the needs of our eCommerce store users was the first step. Subsequently, we embarked on identifying the core functions essential for our supply chain team to deliver a superior physical product experience to both our users and their customers. This involved pinpointing key problem areas that necessitated solutions via our Minimum Viable Product (MVP). We utilized the jobs to be done framework in order to map out all the tasks our supply chain team needed to do. From there we identified some pain points across the various internal team members in being successful in their jobs.
The Solution
We honed in on the following high-level 'jobs':
- Creating a new product
- Editing a product
- Viewing and managing product data
Delving deeper into these high-level tasks involved interviewing our supply chain teams to grasp the nuances of each aspect. This exploration enabled the development of an information architecture strategy for optimizing the product experience, which encompassed three distinct categories of product-related data:
- Manufacturer's product offerings (including product SKUs, vendor details, original product images, etc.)
- Gooten's curated product selections from each manufacturer
- Gooten's product catalog (creating product configurations to present to our users)
With the necessary data organized to enhance the product experience, the next step was to craft a user flow for creating a new product. Collaboration with our product and engineering teams led us to opt for material design to expedite implementation—a strategy to which I wholeheartedly agreed, given the internal nature of the product. With alignment and buy-in from our internal users and stakeholders secured, I proceeded to explore UX elements through wireframes before transitioning to more detailed UI designs.