A responsive website increasing Cacique’s exposure to international clientele by facilitating product discovery and company communication wherever they’re from.

About Cacique

Cacique is a B2B agriculture business based in the Dominican Republic seeking to expand to an international clientele.

In the Dominican Republic, the process of acquiring a supplier is very informal, with few to no customers using technology as a solution. Internationally though, online presence is essential to reach new clients— so if Cacique wanted to have a chance in the international market, they needed a responsive website!

-project background-

The need for a responsive website starts here

Cacique is entering a new market and, as such, they lack recognition internationally. They came to me wanting to stand out from the rest of their competitors, while maintaining their brand image. At the same time, their target users are extremely busy— they have a limited amount of time on their hands to make sure Cacique is the right fit. How can Cacique provide its users a quick and easy way to familiarize themselves with the company?

Users

Project goals

Create a responsive website that ensures ease of use through intuitive navigation and design.

Optimize the website for seamless information discovery, enabling users to quickly find what they need.

-problem discovery-

Let’s find out— user interviews

Since each stakeholder has a vastly different focus area within the DR process, we conducted stakeholder interviews to cover topics such as current processes, pain points, and future use cases. This information not only helped us better understand stakeholders and their role, but also informed design sprint planning.

TURNING

POINT

Successful DR events involve multiple steps including pre- to post-event processes. Initially, the dashboard was intended to focus solely on the ‘pre-event’ steps. However, stakeholder interviews uncovered the need of a more comprehensive dashboard.

At this point the dashboard evolved, now being inclusive of event lifecycle as a whole. However, due to time and technical constraints, the MVP focused only on the pre-event processes.

-solutioning-

Design sprints— finding solutions ASAP!

We chose to follow a modified version Google Venture’s Design Sprint due to time constraints. The design sprint involved a representative from each stakeholder group to ensure that all voices were heard in a collaborative environment.

DAY 1

Made sure we really understood stakeholder’s process by reviewing ‘current process’ flowchart mapped with stakeholder frustrations. After confirming painpoints, created main How Might We (HMW) statements to focus on for the rest of the sprint.

DAY 2

After looking for inspiration in other digital solutions, participants sketched and voted on the features that would solve the HMW statements. This informed a list of requirements for the dashboard.

DAY 3

Created mid-fidelity wireframes based on the requirement list from the second day and conducted synchronous usability tests to get user feedback early on.

-testing-

Usability testing

Conducted a second round of usability tests with updated design from design sprint’s usability findings.

Synthesized findings through affinity mapping and made insights actionable by prioritizing features and functionalities through a tier list based on feature importance to users and technical feasibility.

New designs = Increased time efficency!

Informed by the tier list, I updated the design. This new version optimized the dashboard to reduce even more manual tasks and improve dashboard onboarding by working on making features and functionalities more intuitive.

Post-usability1 2.jpg
Post-usability2 2.jpg

-final design-

Uplight-ifying the design

To finalize the MVP, a design system review session was done. This session consisted of a comprehensive review of navigation hierarchy, list view improvements, and general UI enhancements to align the visuals with the rest of Uplight’s products.

Technical feasibility changes

Conducted a last MVP check-in with engineering. At this time, certain features were taken out of the picture such as calendar view and event overview tab in the main navigation. To keep us centered in the purpose of the dashboard, these tabs are still included in the prototype (yet will not be included in the launched product).

Project impact!

  • By showing real-time event evaluation step status, Ops and Account Managers no longer need to go through endless Slack threads to find out event status.

    Additionally, highlighting event evaluation stats eliminates the need to cross-reference other platforms to ensure accuracy.

  • Thanks to icons, banners, and code links, we were able to provide a way to identify and solve problems faster. For engineering, this means saving more than 30 minutes per incident hunting for event logs by surfacing relevant code right away.

  • More manual tasks = more probability for human errors to occur. We found that reducing manual tasks required led to decreased chances of making unwanted mistakes.

  • All impacts mentioned above led to less stress and freed up mental capacity that would otherwise be used in manual tasks, enabling focus for more important tasks and increasing efficiency.

-next steps-

Going beyond MVP

  • As mentioned in the beginning of the case study, and despite the MVP only focusing on the pre-event processes, this dashboard is set to solve for the event lifecycle as a whole. Throughout this project, I kept track of features that fell outside of the MVP version in Miro. After launching the current version, the next step would be to collect launched design feedback and revisit MVP+ requirement list to inform the next research plan.

  • Currently, events can only be viewed as a list of the present day. If a user wants to view a past or future event, they’d need to skip through every single day. Based on research findings, a calendar view would improve historical observability leading to more time efficiency.

  • Having stats for the overall season would help stakeholders complete seasonal performance analysis, which is a very tedious task at the moment.

Takeaways

Communicating effectively

At Uplight, I honed my ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams by tailoring conversations to their needs. I learned how asking upfront about their priorities made discussions smoother and more effective.

Embracing blank space

This project taught me the power of blank space in making complex data more digestible. By embracing empty spaces, I learned to highlight key information and reduce information overload in data-heavy designs.

Embracing blank space

This experience definitely upped my Figma game! I can now confidently say that I am a more efficient designer, by building the habit of designing with auto-layout, components, and lots and lots of keyboard shortcuts.