PRODUCT DESIGN / UX / UI
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Restore for Retail
Web + mobile
Who is Restore for Retail?
Restore is a comprehensive platform designed to streamline communication and task management for individuals and businesses alike. At its core, Restore acts as a centralised hub where users can access, organise, and act upon important information and tasks efficiently.
My role and objectives
I was hired to lead the design effort for Restore’s SaaS product. My role involved addressing immediate UX issues, designing a number of key features, and ensuring a seamless user experience throughout the platform.
My focus:
- Identify and resolved critical UX issues, proposing quick-win solutions for immediate usability improvements
- Redesign key features to simplify workflows and enhance accessibility
- Improve usability through streamlined processes and improve task management
- Lay the foundation for a unified visual UI style with a minimalist and consistent visual language.
Tools used
The problems and how they were solved
Through mapping key user task/flow journeys and collaborating with the PO and customer-facing teams, we identified gaps and prioritised areas of focus.
One key problem was tracking and managing assignee progress, which was time-consuming and unintuitive. Store managers lacked a clear, centralised view to see who had incomplete tasks. Large stores with many assignees struggled to efficiently track progress and identify overdue or unfinished work.
Another issue was disjointed communication. There was no efficient way to discuss specific tasks, and email communication lacked visibility and clarity. Managers needed better tools to ensure tasks were completed, enabling teams to move on to the next.
The approach
My approach to solving these problems were to:
- Gather requirements and prioritise with PO and other stakeholders
- Understand users and their problems further by speaking to the customer-facing team
- Create scenarios with PO to help us understand the user problems
- Create prototypes to demonstrate the proposed flow and interactions
- Conduct feedback sessions with team members / customer facing members and a design critique session with design team
- Consult engineering on technical feasibility
- Refine designs and delivered high-fidelity screens to the engineering team.
Who we're designing for
As part of the design team, we created (preliminary) proto-personas to help:
- align stakeholders on a shared understanding of target users
- quickly establish user archetypes based on existing knowledge and assumptions
- guide initial design decisions when full user research isn't immediately feasible
- facilitate empathy and user-focused thinking among team members
Later on some more research had begun to start validating these personas. But as a starting point they were important in helping us understand who we were designing for.
To kick-start the persona creation process, I used AI tools to rapidly generate initial 'proto-personas.' This approach significantly accelerated the process, allowing me to collaborate with the product owner to validate and refine these personas to better align with real Restore users. The aim was to continue conducting interviews with actual users, using the insights gathered to further inform and enhance these personas. But great to have something to share with the team and make sure we were all on the same page with key user groups and their tasks, needs and behaviours.
Scenarios: aligning features with user Goals
Some of the features had some comoplex use-cases, so creating scenarios with the PO was important to help everyone understand what the user needed to do.
Prototyping - refining - iterating
Creating quick prototypes helped showcase how the screens fit together in context and helped demonstrate interactions. This was helpful in showing a specific part of the journey and obtaining beedback to help inform design and then iterate further.
The design system and unifying the UI
Part of the ongoing effort was to move Restore towards a cleaner, minimalist as well as a unified and consistent look and feel. I introduced a number of new component which were used in the new features as part of updatung the component library and paving the way for the design system.
UI style tile
By placing all the key elements onto one page, we could make sure there was consistency across the Restore platform.
Clear handoff for engineers
Quick ideas through sketching were cruitial for some of the more complex screens and interactions before jumping into higher fidelity wires. Collaborating with the UX manager and other members of the team was important so we could move quickly through the process.
The extra details
I ensured that we looked at those extra things such as empty states, those screens and use-cases you don't immediately think of. We included some delight her to help users go ahead and in this instance be the first to make a comment on the task they were assigned to.
Outomes
Features was released shortly before my contract ended, with early feedback highlighting positive reception regarding ease of use, UI and overall functionality.
Recurring tasks
Adopted by approx 60–75% of brands for repetitive tasks. Users who try it once are often creating more, indicating strong satisfaction and value.
Comments on tasks
This has been highly valued by stores, with some using it as a communication tool between managers. Adjustments are being made to optimise handling.
Updated task landing screens
plus the assignee modal
This is currently making checking tasks far easier, particularly for more senior managers & Customer Success Managers.
“Now we can see details easily, filter to the date range we need to check, easily see completions or if there any comments”.
Overall, while it’s early days, the updates have been well-received by customers so far.
I’d love to chat about how I can help you. Say hi over email.
Contact me
© Jeremy Laycock