Custom Contents Management System
Canada Computers (CC) Founded in 1991, Canada Computers & Electronics is a retailer of personal computers, IT and components, as well as consumer electronics. Over its 30-year history, they continue to provide customers with the best products at the best value that the computer retail world can offer.
Project Scope: 4 months
Role: Design Lead, UX Research, UI Design
Background
Challenge :
Canada Computers runs various promotions on a daily and weekly basis. That includes several different banners on the front page, and each category page refreshes banners every day. And sometimes, the image needs to be replaced urgently by a pricing error, wrong product photo used, or vendor's specific requests. Whenever there's a content change, each department had to request the web department. Because apparently, all the data is saved on a server, but not everyone has the same level of access, so it was very hard to modify.
For example, graphic designers also did not have permission to access the server, so developers took over the files and manually uploaded each page. Occasionally, when developers were busy, the update was pending, and there were many customer complaints. Therefore, each department needed to upload or modify contents in terms of maintenance perspective.
Goal :
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Simple banner change
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Multiple users access the page simultaneously
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History of edit person
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mark if the banner spot booked by vendor (paid)
Process:
This design evolved along with lot of rounds of iteration during different stages. To execute requests from every department, the web team had to understand each department's role and responsibilities. After gathering all the required information from the meetings, my team researched existing CMS solutions and decided to make our platform. The team started brainstorming to generate ideas for the user flow, first draft, wireframes, and style. Based on the first user feedback, we converted feedback into necessary modifications. We had to compromise many features during the test because of the limited time to execute. The marketing and web team needed to finish this before boxing day season for high-volume duties. Initially, we wanted to integrate with customers' information and would be helpful for personalized web, but it required more support from the backend team. So I pushed back the plans after peak season.
Design System
Result
Since we created the CMS for web tasks, it could save lots of time and effort. Based on the time we measured internally, the speed of execution time was 175% faster, and less human error occurred. The page contains a history section to prevent overwriting mistakes, especially in crunch mode.