Meru
Designing the first iteration of a product
UI Design & Case Study
Menu
Role
Tools
Timeline
Team
Product Designer
Figma
Zeplin
JIRA
Material UI
4 Weeks
Co-founder
Engineer & CTO
Challenge
When I first met with our co-founders, they had already done so much market research and had a clear goal of what the product be: a Shopify app that enables creators (or influencers) to create and manage their own storefront. Now they needed someone to actually design crucial screens in order to show something to investors.
The goal is to design the UI for our customer-facing MVP. This is the desktop app where creators can manage their storefronts for their followers and customers to shop on. The main problem I am designing for:
The creator needs a way to better manage the products they promote so that they can spend more time on monetization and less time updating their Linktree and promo codes.
Solution
Discover 🔎
A creator needs a way to start discovering products for their store, and our main goal is to eventually have them be recommended and tailored to them. This is why I added a way to heart a product to show more like that, dislike (thumbs down) a product to not show others like it, or click “add to shop”.
Product Table 🛍
Going off of how people (not just creators!) typically manage anything is usually with a table, I decided to go with that here. The creator can easily see all their products and have the ability to search, filter, and quickly edit a product.
Collections 📚
I wanted the experience of both creators managing products and customers shopping products to be familiar and easy. This is solved by creators having different collections for a customer to browse by, such as “My Closet” or “Workout Favorites”.
Analytics 📊
When our co-founders spoke with some tastemakers while building out the concept of the product, most mentioned that it’s important to be able to see some sort of analytics on their products. This is why I designed each collection to have it’s own stats, while the overall store analytics could live on their home dashboard upon login (to be designed later!) It was also important that tastemakers are able to personalize their store, so they are able to add a blurb about a collection and a picture.
Style Guide
Outcome
- As of today, we’re publicly live on the Shopify app store!
- Shopify brands can download our app, and make their products discoverable to our network of creators in minutes.
- Creators can then navigate to the “Discover” tab in Meru and add products to their creator shop with the click of the button.
- When a customer checks out for a creator shop, we (Meru) and the creator get paid.
Next Steps & Reflection
Because Meru is such an early-stage startup, there were constraints that made this project mainly UI focused. There was a time constraint for getting mockups in front of investors in a couple of weeks and a budget constraint for any user research. Given those constraints this project was mainly UI focused. However, I will be able to revisit this project in the near future to use a more in depth UX process to iterate! Some next steps in terms of being able to iterate on these designs are:
- Prototype these screens to create the crucial flows that creators would use when managing their shop.
- Conduct usability testing with the creators who sign up for the Beta.
- Design an onboarding experience for when creators sign up for Meru and begin making their storefront (my first crack at it in the hero image
)
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