CRM System — a UX case study

It’s common that the life of a Business Manager is full of challenges. With the different tasks and responsibilities they have comes multiple complications and stress on a daily basis.

My last Summer Intern was dedicated to this project. My goal as a product designer is to design a company resource management (CRM) software for leisure organizations.

Introduction :

Enterprise SaaS products are hard to build. It is not only difficult to figure out what features should be built, in which order, and how they should function, but it is also challenging to strike a balance between the amount of information displayed at any given time and the cognitive load the platform places on its users.

It’s common that lot of business face many challenges with managing huge pile of different data on a daily basis and they face multiple complications and stress if they have to do it on paper. One of those biggest challenge they face is the hours spent adding information and data on papers which is very frustrating considered a heavy daily task.

That’s where we come in as a product designer in charge of the CRM to make business lives a bit easier when it comes to data entry and organizing information.

Company Resource management system is the system used by different businesses to manage their various resources effectively. The CRM application will help to decrease the time users spend struggling with the data management and focus more on their clients and other tasks.

Problem Statement :

Allspark Jewelry owned by Natani Jewels want to build their own Company Recourse Management (CRM) System to take all their data record, management online.

My mission in this project is to design a user friendly system to ease and digitalize the managements of the resources.

Some of the features they demand are like below:

1. Dashboard with daily update of Gold and Silver price, growth and order no.
2. To manage the upcoming, ongoing and finished order
3. To check the manufacturing process and the amount of wastage per process.
4. Report with detail analysis of order, process, manufacturing detail.
5. A stock maintenance page to check all the incoming and outgoing of stocks
6. Employee Management system
7. Costumer panel to manage customer database

Task :

My role is to design a single multi-functional tool, which could help the company’s employee to manage the resources of the company, also to digitize and ease of data management.

What I did :

Challenges:

1. Our goal is to make the design universal so that any business can use it without much customization.
2. Easy-to-use product that doesn’t require any navigation.
3. Adapt the design to different age groups by keeping it simple but modern.

Design Process:

Used the Design Thinking approach for solving this problem. To practice design thinking we followed the below process.

User Research

I created the user surveys and conducted interviews to understand the problems. Several days of questions and answers were recorded, and based on the responses, the following key insights were derived.

• ‘User base’ — The survey found that most people who will use this product are managers and higher-level employees.
• ‘Experience’ — They don’t have any prior experience with such product other than MS software like excel.
• Most of them are frustrated using old methods and want some quick solution.

Define Phase

Created personas understand more about the user’s problems.

Ideation Phase

Created ecosystem to learn more about the domain, task flows to align design decisions with user’s behavior, and information architecture to understand the domain and IA which forms the basis for the product.

Design Phase

Followed the below steps in the design phase:

1. Paper Sketches and Ideations
2. Low-fidelity wireframes with variations
3. Mid-fidelity wireframes
4. Final Design

I started with paper prototypes and conducted usability testing on users.

It helped me to validate the principal flow, and the creation of a new various section to access the data of all departments. I also discovered that :

1. filters were still too technical and needed to speak for themselves.
2. need of a simplified system with minimum input to manage the technical data during manufacturing process.
3. Tracking of material wastage is necessary as they deal with material like gold and silver.
4. An inventory management system that keeps track of incoming and outgoing stock.

Mid-fidelity Wireframes:

Design System:

I used the colors of the logo, with the Prussian Blue as the main color for balance and reliability.

I choose the Inter typography because it’s legible, easy to adapt and used on 4 font-sizes and 2 font-weights only for consistency’s sake. For secondary font I choose Shanti typography. Here are the components, and I picked material design icons (and designs 2 icons, inspired by the material design icons).

Final UI:

Home Page-

Order Page-

Inventory Management Page -

Employee Management System -

Usability tests :

Finally, I conducted usability tests on the high fidelity prototype on target users. It helped me uncover new design possibilities and solutions that might otherwise go unnoticed.

I was very pleased to see they found my solution fast, clear and easy-to-use.

What Did I learn?

The project helped me to learn more about the process of a design thinking framework. I learn to do better visuals with the material design guidelines, by creating a small component library. Also learned how to empathize with the users in a better way.

The design thinking process is very powerful and gave me the perfect guidelines to rock this project.

Client was happy with my solution and thought it was a great start for their CRM project. They will iterate on it and make it better. Finally we are moving forward for phase2 of the CRM, adding more features in it including its mobile version.

- Thank you for reading this UX & UI use case and feel free to leave comments and feedback!