FEATURE
Redesigning a cluttered sidebar into a personalised, desirable control center
THE WHY, WHO, WHAT, WHEN & HOW
The Why: The Sidebar has 50+ items, finding a specific page was tedious and prone to frustrations and errors
Who was it for: It was rebuilt for all the XTOPUS users (50+)
The Team: Product Manager + Engineering Team + Users + Me (Designer+Researcher)
Timeline: Aug. 2025 - Sept. 2025
Tools: Jira, FigJam, Figma, Microsoft Clarity, Lyssna
Metrics: Time spent to reach the desired page, User Feedback
THE CONTEXT
XTOPUS is an internal tool used daily by multiple teams - warehouse, marketing, buying & customer support.
The sidebar was functional, but over time it became dense, cognitively heavy, and inefficient as the product scaled.
Users could technically find what they needed, but there was much room for improvement in making it their favourite space in the app. Also, this began as the first step of personalisation of XTOPUS.
THE PROBLEMS
What are the known user problems?
- Lack of the ability to search for a desired page
- Having to expand and close the chevron every time they want to go to a certain page
- Having to remember where each of the subcategory pages are present
- Messy sidebar with multiple categories open
- Improper categorisation of subcategory pages
DISCOVER
🗣️ From Usable to Desirable
In order to optimise the sidebar, I spoke with multiple 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 to understand the most used pages by each team.
While observing how they interact with it, few patterns emerged.
- A small set of pages accounted for most daily usage
- When asked to visit a rarely used page, users struggled to find it, opening and closing different categories
- Few users got frustrated evidently
- Navigation slowed further when tasked with other tasks
The sidebar
Usage Map
Warehouse Team
Marketing Team
Buying Team
Customer Support Team
Time taken to reach a well known page: <2s
Time taken to reach an unknown page: >4s
Task Completion % (Well known page when paired with other tasks) - 100%
Task Completion % (Unknown page when paired with other tasks) - 90%
Metrics Before Changes
Insights
- Users have a set mental model, fixed spots and cursor paths
- They retrieve instead of browsing, except for the early days
- Reordering can cause friction
- Shortcuts can be helpful
- Reducing what the brain has to ignore, can reduce fatigue
DESIGN IMPLEMENTATIONS
- Reordered navigation by usage frequency
Instead of a purely logical grouping, frequently used pages were surfaced higher to reduce scanning time.
- Favourite/pinned items
Users could pin the pages they accessed daily, creating a personalised “fast lane” without restructuring the entire IA.
- Collapsible sidebar
Gave users control over visual density, especially helpful for experienced users who navigated by muscle memory.
- Searchbar as an extra support
Added the ability to search, saving time and frustrations.
- Multiple Timezones
Added the ability to view multiple times across different Unineed offices.
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
BEFORE
AFTER
My favourite bit: The Time Viewer
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 timezones 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.
RESULTS
Feedback from users:
"Very useful to be able to hide this thing"
"The timezones is a brilliant feature"
"Loving the new sidebar. One thing that would be nice to have is to reorder the pinned items"
"The favourites panel is super handy!"
"New XTOPUS looking class"
Time taken to reach a well known page: <1.2s -0.8s
Time taken to reach an unknown page: <3s
Task Completion % (Well known page when paired with other tasks) - 100%
Task Completion % (Unknown page when paired with other tasks) - 100% +10%
Metrics After Changes
