Kin + Carta (K+C) is a B Corp-certified technology, data, and experience consultancy that believes in using business as a force for good.
Gordon Food Services (GFS) is a leading family-owned food distributor in Grand Rapids, MI, servicing supermarkets, hospitals, and schools in Canada and expanding rapidly in the US.
GFS was using a food service backend solution from a company that would no longer support them because they were going out of business. As a result, GFS had to port its entire system to a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution and hired K+C to complete the project in under ten months.
GFS struggled financially due to the pandemic because of school closures and supermarket supply-chain demand issues, losing revenue to two of its three primary sources of income. As a result, the project stalled, but the work still needed to be completed. Eventually, after learning to navigate the mid-pandemic landscape, GFS started ramping up again with K+C to continue the project.
I was the sole designer leading two cross-functional teams of sixteen individuals. Each team had its corresponding product manager and shared a product owner on the client side. Through iterative design and delivery, I redesigned Gordon Ordering's responsive web e-commerce end-to-end ordering experience workflows, including new features in all breakpoints and a modern UI based on a new design system.
Before I got involved, GFS conducted user research pre-pandemic but would not invest in it again. The study included observation as users went through workflows from the system we would replace. The main takeaway from the research was that users wanted to see the most information in the least amount of space. So, I followed these principles:
After PI Planning sessions, I scheduled kick-off meetings with the product owner and other stakeholders where they provided me with loose requirements. Then, if necessary, I met with them again to gather more granularity.
UX design took place two to three sprints ahead of development. So, I started by reviewing workflows from the system to be deprecated and the design work begun pre-pandemic but abandoned.
Next, I presented the analyst writing the user stories with wireframes to determine the most straightforward user workflows and development options. Finally, after further collaboration with the solutions architect and front-end developers, we honed in on an approach.
As I prepared my demos, I considered the intended audience and decided what to include to prevent cognitive overload. The meetings would typically include the product owner, the product manager for the team I was working for, an architect, and an analyst writing the user stories. While demoing, I approximated my end goal as soon as possible. We discussed new written content and agreed upon it. I kept design demos to their bare minimum and presented often to keep everyone on the same page.
I presented the happy path for stakeholder buy-in and comments and further iterated the design as needed. I also demoed to the GFS UX team to discuss new UI proposals and ensure workflows followed established patterns. I would then post click-thrus in three different breakpoints and a link to the Figma file in Jira and the corresponding feature channel in Slack. Next, I added newly created components to the design system and updated existing ones as needed. Finally, we built edge-case workflows into the prototypes, ensuring we were not introducing unnecessary complexity while keeping UI patterns consistent.
We completed iterative design and delivery for the end-to-end workflow for Gordon Ordering in ten months. As development proceeded, I was called in for UX reviews and further iterating on the design or providing approvals through Jira. As new areas and features of the new site went live, new customer acquisition rates increased an average of 10 – 15% monthly.
I would have wanted to conduct user research before starting the design work to understand better why I was doing what I was doing. I would have also liked to usability test unvalidated workflows for new features. But, unfortunately, the pandemic prevented us from doing so.
