Product Experience Management & Merchandising: Product Design

Merchandisers: We see you. Our goal at Elastic Path is to solve your eCommerce problems. As merchandizers you are tasked with maintaining product and responding to customer and business demand through analysis and insights. No easy feat, especially now more than ever in a highly competitive digital commerce landscape with half the time to complete twice the tasks.

UX/UI Informed Design

We lean on best practices when designing products for the busy merchandiser such as the proven tenets of User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design.

I like to think of UX/UI design as an iceberg. Not of the cold, Titanic-leveling variety; but more of a multi-layered and powerful creation that is more than meets the eye.

Think of UX as end-to-end workflow, and UI as usability; or how you interact with the visual components of the platform to accomplish the workflow.

At its surface, the UI gives us the look and feel of the site; both the graphic and visual design to support the branding, and the ease of navigation. But slip down a level into where the UX begins; where functions like scope and structure live, and the all-important strategy; the how you accomplish your business objectives each and every day.

Improve workflows, reduce pain points

As a merchandiser your world is product management, data, and analytics. You have catalogs and price books to manage, promotions, SKUs, and the task of how best to market what you have in what limited time you have to do it.

We study your business needs and create personas to get a better understanding of workflows and how to solve your pain points.

Your daily struggles may involve adjusting categories, setting up repeat promotions, testing changes, or managing data to gain insight into customers’ buying habits. We study these pain points and come up with core design principles for our products that address problems head on; what you’re looking for is a platform to manage all these specific tasks with a high level of flexibility, accuracy, and consistency.

Our success is your success

Our product’s success depends on you. We look at behavioral and attitudinal aspects of how you interact with the product: how fast did you learn a task? How many features did you use? How satisfied were you overall with its performance? We may also look at a system usability score (SUS) or a net promoter score (NPS) to gauge and further document satisfaction.

Always improving always testing

From there we work to improve the product. How can we improve on existing features in the long and short term like account management, data visualization, promotions, or how new team members onboard with the platform? Our goal is to continually improve, so you and your customers get the most value from a system that grows with you.

How we partner with our customers

• Observation and Contextual Interviewing – We watch, listen, and ask questions to better understand how you’re using the product and directly address needs and gaps
• Concept Testing – Your input directly affects product improvement and testing
• Customer Success – We have a dedicated team to your feedback and success

What does this mean for merchandisers?

You get the latest in product innovation. Real solutions for your problems, with the full support of our product and customer success teams.

EP Product Experience Manager (PXM) offers more flexibility and speed to manage complex catalogs and product experiences across brands, geos, touchpoints, and business models 5 times faster than more rigid tools of the past.

You don’t need additional development work, or potentially messy customizations and workarounds to manage multiple catalogs as you scale from week, to month, to year.

I invite you to take a tour and see for yourself the power and flexibility of this tool, and how it can transform your eCommerce playbook.