Project Structure

Overview

Our mandate: create a digitally transformative platform that empowers customers to shop a vast surplus inventory and pave the way for future e-commerce strategies, such as app-exclusives or localized offerings. We tried to find an innovation sweet spot of mobile-relevant enhancements that leveraged current resources and capabilities to bring an product to market.

Core principles

• Establish a core competency, or key experience to deliver
• Create principles for design decisions.
• Prototype often (think by doing).

Establishing a Core Competency to Deliver

A core competency is the driving engine, or mechanic, laying the foundations for a product's growth. It answers the simple question, “What does it do?”, and serves as the fulcrum for the design experience. The core competency for the backchannel is incubated within the domain of data algorithms, an area with great potential and not fully harnessed in any one channel.

In defining what that core “thing” is, we looked at these value propositions:

Customer needs: How might we allow customers to discover and shop for surplus items in our ever-increasing inventory with ease?

Business objectives: With our vast catalog, how do we ensure that all of our products are being seen by the right people? A.K.A. increasing conversion on the web channel.

In this context, we concluded that the web app’s core competency was its data-driven recommendation engine’s ability to drive fully personalized product recommendations, which would allow customers to discover and engage with relevant products faster.

This idea of a data-driven interface for our product catalog is one of the ultimate, defining characteristics of the backchannel Platform. Not only would it reduce friction points on our web channel, but it would also tackle the challenge of personalization that is becoming increasingly relevant in the world of e-commerce. While ‘personalization’ is not a new concept, backchannel is in the business of taking what is familiar and serving it in new formats. We will take the fundamental idea of a data-driven inventory to inspire and define design principles related to function (UX) and form (UI).

Creating Principles For Design

• Hyper-personalization: offer engaging recommendations in relevant contexts.
• Endless discovery: allows opportunities for continual browsing, no dead ends.
• Seamless efficiency: offer easy ways to navigate through, or dive in/out of the catalog.

Reductionist

Rather than play into the all-too-familiar minimal aesthetic, we will reduce UI elements to their utmost practical, primitive form. The notion of “brutal utility” manifested in quick, no-frill transitions, and rigid animations. We will remove the ambiguity of iconography and opt for text instead, creating a tone that is very plain and factual to simplify the UI, while streamlining the design process by eliminating unnecessary complexity.

Dense

Early on, we want to work with the idea of completely allowing the function of the web app to inform the ‘form’, or layout of the UI. The visually dense aesthetic that we will adopt aims to convey a curated slice of products within our vast catalog. We will establish parallels to consumer behavior in an era of technology (normalized multi-tasking, over-stimulation, immediacy, and speed) by creating a tight grid system where products sit flush together. Rows and columns could multiply to change the layout of products. We will maximize white space where product recommendations could exist and unapologetically dial-up data-driven aspects and fervent shopping in the app’s aesthetic.

Systematic

We’re working towards automating processes and maintaining as much operational efficiency as possible. We will create recognizable patterns for our shop and want to integrate this approach while designing the backchannel web app. By removing levers of manual operation and allowing the app to run its recommendations and learn about customers autonomously, we are creating a coherent system for product organization.