Back to Home
Redesigning for predictability without breaking muscle memory
Problem
Selling non-scannable items required employees to switch between three mental models: configuring made-to-order food, identifying unlabelled products, and selecting digital products based on client description. As the catalogue grew, speed increasingly depended on tile positions that were memorized due to inconsistent placement which hindered first-attempt accuracy. Legacy structure needed redesign, but radical change risked wiping out years of muscle memory. Hence, the adaptation cost of even minor changes was highly increased. Workflow continuity during peak hours was non-negotiable
My scope
- Leading and carrying out problem discovery (incl. UX research) for the entire sales workflow
- Workshopping business needs around non-scannable products with business owners
- Product Design: analyzing and designing the non-scannable products flow. Validating new flows with frontline employees
Solutions
- Continuous discovery framework, initial team roadmap, and research milestones to improve cross-team coordination
- Maps of key JTBDs, user journeys, and problems across the sales workflow
- Coherent product models defining rules for navigation, content, and categories
- IDE-based prototypes tested with frontline employees
Results
- Milestone-based collaboration did not hold over time because of competing workloads
- Foundational research became a shared knowledge base planned to become an IDE-based wiki. It’s already a key reference point for work across sales processes, while facilitating onboarding of new team members
- Component-level issues were separated from ecosystem dependencies. Targeted recommendations and guidelines were laid out for the improvements inspired by my work
- Alongside feasible concepts, a more advanced solution was screened for desirability to inform future product opportunities
- Current testing captured mostly immediate usability, not habit-driven performance. I developed a concrete, clear measurement points and actionable metrics for the pilot phase. The challenge would be to roll it to both protect frontline employee workflows and measure adaptation, muscle memory and performance in production
