Connect: Mobile Minimalism to Store Level

Going from good to great.

Sometimes a good idea becomes the stepping stone for a greater one.

Connect is a B2B messaging platform for Dell sellers to communicate with customers. We explored a simplified mobile-first experience, but this player was put on the bench as business priorities shifted and another player took the field (Store Level).

Chapter 1: Mobile Minimalism

Role: Product Designer I

Timeline: Spring 2024

Team: 3 Designers

Tools: Figma, Miro, UserTesting.com

Responsibilities: Usability Testing, A/B Testing, Accessibility Reviews, Design Critiques, Interactive Prototypes

Goal: Understand how users wanted mobile collaboration to work

End-to-end process

Problem

Connect was underperforming. We wanted to increase adoption so we had to figure out what needed to change. The plan was to do a feature redesign with a mobile optimization. Taking a previously web-focused application and make it minimalistic, adapting it to the mobile experience.

Research

I co-conducted unmoderated A/B testing, usability testing, accessibility reviews and design critiques with other designers.

Key Insight

When testing, many users noted that the functionality was intuitive and there was a decrease in visual clutter.

Iteration

After analyzing the user responses, our team was able to iterate and improve upon our original assumptions. After making changes, we continued with multiple rounds of testing and iterating. We refined icon placement, hierarchy, and spacing across multiple versions.

Outcome

Although this Mobile Minimalism redesign wasn’t shipped, it’s research, testing, and design explorations laid the foundation for Store Level Collaboration. Continue to Chapter 2 to see how those insights evolved into a production launch

Chapter 2: Store Level Collab

Role: Product Designer I

Timeline: Summer 2024

Team: 3 Designers

Tools: Figma, Miro, UserTesting.com

Responsibilities: Usability Testing, A/B Testing, Accessibility Reviews, Design Share, Edge Case Designs, Interactive Prototypes, Responsive Design

Goal: Enable customers and sales representative to start and manage conversations from anywhere within Dell’s Premier buying experience instead of only on individual product pages.

From Page to Store Level

Problem

Connect was only available from individual product pages. This meant that customer conversations couldn’t start naturally as customers navigated across Premier, this added unnecessary friction for customers and sales representatives. Stakeholders wanted Connect to become available throughout the experience.

Constraints

To meet an aggressive delivery timeline and minimize engineering effort, we built on existing design system components rather than shipping the Mobile Minimalism redesign. While those concepts remained in the backlog, many of the learnings carried forward into a solution that was simpler, scalable, and ready for production

My Approach

Instead of redesigning the experience from scratch, I focused on extending existing components into a scalable Store Level collaboration experience.
When working closely with engineering, I prioritized reusable components, responsive layouts, new collaboration flows with edge cases, and developer-friendly implementation
Presented our design direction and rationale to cross-functional stakeholders during a Design Share while serving as the primary design representative in my lead designer’s absence