Creating a single source of truth for Items and managing multiple values for a single key.
In the GSC web app, Catalogs and Items are a popular feature that allows a company to deliver product data to the appropriate field representative. In turn, the field representative knows which products to report on without being distracted by unnecessary product data. Before the redesign, web app users were unable to manage Catalogs and Items through the UI. The management burden fell on CSMs to create, update, and organize Items. There was also no single source of truth for Items. If an Item needed to be updated, the Item had to be updated in every Catalog it appeared in, creating more opportunity for error. If an Item was assign more than one property value, another instance of that Item had to be created. This ultimately caused problems when scaling the system.
After gathering user feedback, we strategized the best solutions for the problems identified. We knew we needed to create an interface where users could manage their own Catalogs and Items. However, we would have to reconstruct the Catalogs and Items information architecture in order to create a single source of truth for Items. The changes to properties necessitated a redesign of our data tables so they could display and filter multiple values for one key. This led to designing and testing multiple microinteractions including filtering, sorting, searching, and resizing columns.
Once the prototype was built, I conducted a task-based usability study where participants were asked to create and edit an Item and a Catalog. Three main themes were identified: clarity, consistency, and feature feedback. Clarity could be improved by increasing the visibility of system status in certain areas. A good example of this is communicating if an export included all instances or the filtered instances. Unfortunately, consistency has been an issue in several areas of our web app. The study's findings affirm the need to redesign several parts of our system to create a consistent information architecture and task flow. Participants gave great feedback on additional features and functionality they would like to see in the system.
The new Catalogs and Items design is projected to save GSC employees up to 100 hours a month in managing Catalogs and Items. In some of the worst cases, a single Item needed to be duplicated 30,000 times within the necessary Catalogs and with the assign property values. This redesign greatly inceases performance and prevents cumbersome, error-proned reporting workarounds to account for the disparities in the data.
