Product designer, driving all aspects of the design execution.
As the only designer, I was juggling any of the following tasks on a daily basis:
The printing industry is truly underserved in terms of legitimate and intuitive work management tools. Software is fragmented and typically bound to the printing machines, and other horizontal software that aims to bring efficiency is convoluted and siloed with a lack of integrations. Furthermore, the print customer is completely left out of the picture in terms of the capabilities of these tools and almost all of them don't interface with the customer at all.
Hatteras Press, an innovative commercial printing company in NJ, and it's leadership team saw the gap in the lack of customer integrated and truly cross-functional/horizontal work management capability within the industry and decided to pioneer a new solution to fill it. Commercial printing companies are bogged down with customer service, typically with questions about things like pricing, timelines, and the general status of a given print 'job'. All of this data was available in their systems, they just needed to create a way for their customers and their teams to interface with it...and obviously it needed to be intuitive and have some level of anticipatory design with things like automatic triggers and alerts, communications, and eliminate manual processes like seeking out job status via a hand-typed email or a phone call.
First we wanted to identify the both the biggest and the simplest problems we could solve, identified through countless interviews with customer service representatives, sales reps, and customers. We then started to map those interactions and touch points out into workflows, finding the areas where the problems existed and the opportunities to fix them. Once we had done this across all of the critical customer touchpoints, we started to prototype solution ideas and test them with the same groups of users (customer service, sales reps, and even some customers). We didn't want to overcomplicate things, but the commercial printing industry is fragmented in terms of how they label things like artwork, specifications, manufacturing processes, and the list goes on from there...so we had to establish rules and set the bar when it came to the information architecture all the way down to the UX copy throughout. We had to push everyone to understand the value of consistency in simple things like labeling job types, the naming structure of jobs, the names of the statuses for jobs, etc. This was all critical to the future success of the platform.
Moving on from there...we created two distinct user experiences which could cohabitate within the same general product infrastructure. The first, was for the customer. This experience was focused around their very limited use cases of seeing their job status, viewing/accepting proofs, re-ordering simple products on inventory, and requesting an estimate. The second, was for the Hatteras employees. This started with customer service, enabling a similar experience to customers but with the ability to handle likewise functions across many customers, and being on the receiving end of customer-driven inputs and updates like proof approvals, etc.
This project is fairly sensitive in terms of the visuals and I cannot disclose more than a few simple mockups unless I am able to do a live demo.
