FEATURE
Redesigning a sidebar into a personalised one, targeting enterprise users
🗣️ From Usable to Desirable
The sidebar was functioning well. The users were not having any issues with it. It was surely usable. But, how do we turn this one universal component into something the users interact more with it, thereby making it desirable?
In order to optimise the sidebar, I spoke with a lot of different users from different teams, trying to understand the pages they use on a regular basis. There are 4 teams - buying, marketing, customer support & warehouse. I created this usage map (made up name), but, yes the idea was to understand the most used pages by each team.
Warehouse Team
Marketing Team
Buying Team
Customer Support Team
Then, I tried to reorder the pages from most used to least used, slightly regroup them for a better hierarchy without altering the mental models much and added the ability to search for a page.
But, imagine having to search for a page every time because you cant remember under which category/dropdown it is located?
💡Eureka! What if we introduce an option to let people pin their most used pages?
This is the reworked structure of the sidebar.
Combined analytics and reports to a new Insights category
Added a new search functionality
Added an option to pin favourite pages here
Moved Media Gallery, Tickets, API Management, Account & Tools to System Category
Moved the inventory category up as it is used frequently by all 4 teams
✨ Updated Sidebar
Added a collapse button so that users can focus more on the table data. The collapsed sidebar looks like this
My favourite bit: The Time Viewer
Most used pages, now just a click away
Unineed employees work from 4 different countries/timezones, constantly having to co-ordinate with each other, track multiple marketplaces timezones - a lot of our team members have added multiple times to their phones and computers. Having observed that, I decided to try and test this feature and received tons of positive feedback about this one.
This feature received some skepticism from the developers that this is something new, unusual and they haven't seen an ERP have this feature.
But, I was able to convince them with the Product Manager and a few users giving a green signal for it. So, we launched it with the timeviewer.
🗣️ Latest Feedback from users:
"Nice wee option to hide the sidebar, Abdul"
"Its cool to be able to see all the times!"
"Loving the new sidebar. Wish to drag and drop the favourite pages soon"
"The favourites bar is super handy!"
"Xtopus looking polished 👍"
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The users do not want change until they use something better
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I have also understood that it's not always about what the users say. Sometimes they do not address the issue until we find it for them, like having to expand one dropdown after another to search for a page they are not familiar with.
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A little bit of extra observation always helps (I shouldn't be looking at my teammates use their phones & computers, but, in my defense, hey its my job to observe and optimise their experience)