Giving a hand to the small business

A few years back I was involved in a project called Āgora Gracia, a wallet designed as a commercial guide for the area of Gracia in Barcelona, Spain. Inside the wallet, you could save all your favourite establishments, had access to their news, promotions, and fidelity cards activated by NFC technology.

Alongside the wallet there was a dashboard for the business owners, a space where they could create and upload content, only available on desktop.

After some time we realised that users weren’t creating content and after speaking with some of them, many reported that the desktop version was a limitation, they didn’t have the time to set content in the computer or didn’t have one available.

To solve these issues I was tasked to condense the existing dashboard in an app form. This project was discarded for budget issues but I took the opportunity to revisit it and clean up some of my mistakes.

UX/UI Design

The Beginning

As metioned before, the wallet already had a functional dashboard on desktop, but we needed a solution for the small and mid business owner that had no time to waste on that version. The main goal of the dashboard was create content, either post information, send notifications about relevant events or offers or even create flash sales.

I had the challenge to condensate every aspect of the desktop and make it fast and easy to use. With the goal of increasing the merchant's movement on the wallet and their interest in the project.

In my first visit to this project I was just starting my path into UI and UX design. The initial screens were rough, clumsy and hard to use if you weren't familiar with the desktop counterpart, many things were hidden and unnecessary. But the general idea was still pretty interesting at the time.

Some time later, I found this project as a good opportunity to clean the mistakes I made in the past, fixing the experience, re-centred the main goal of the app and cleaning the old rusty design.

Wireframes

I already had in hands all the functionalities this dashboard needed, so after a time of research, I started to re-arrange the flow.

Instead of having the content creation section as the landing page as I have it inicially, I decided to have the metrics as the initial screen and content creation one on the center of the navigation

New style

The new design has to look clean with no many components that could distract the user from their main goal. Also should be adaptable for any brand, since initially we wanted to integrate part of the identity of each brand inside the dashboard.

Posting flow

The new design has to look clean with no many components that could distract the user from their main goal. Also should be adaptable for any brand, since initially we wanted to integrate part of the identity of each brand inside the dashboard.