It's a Supply Chain Management workspace that connects retail brands, factories, and production teams, facilitating seamless collaboration throughout the entire product lifecycle and ensuring everyone shares an up-to-date product definition.
Lack of resources, insufficient collaboration, and poor communication have become significant barriers for retail brands, hindering product planning, production speed, sales, and factory relationships.
The/Studio is creating Ecosystem, an on-demand supply chain platform that bridges retail brands and factories, enabling quick manufacturing of small batches.
Retail brands are currently dependent on outdated methods and a combination of applications like WhatsApp, WeChat, Excel sheets, and PDF files to collaborate with factories.
Both retail brands and factories encounter challenges in effectively prioritizing, managing, and completing various tasks, including updating tech packs, reviewing samples, managing invoices and quotations, and tracking orders.
Our product team aimed to integrate their workflows into a smoother web app experience.
As someone not directly involved in apparel manufacturing, I had several goals I aimed to achieve during the research process.
With this agenda in mind, I interviewed the senior womenswear designer William Taswell III and the product developers from the e-commerce stores Kawaii Kowai and Brave Era.
To understand the full workflows in the supply chain
To identify the types of users
To visually represent their tasks at each phase
To outline every touchpoint that users will have with the product
We discovered that the general development cycle consisted of three phases: development, sampling, and production.
A tech pack is ultimately the single source of truth that contains all design specs, technical requirements, sample edits, and quotation.
Based on the journey map, we drew out how the enterprise platform works and broke down the platform into the six main features.
Transform the old methods into a workplace where you can submit product information and upload supplementary files such as tech pack, sketch drawings, and fabric patterns. Having no minimum requirements enables you to test styles in small batches with fast turnaround to eliminate waste and maximize the ROI.
Every order has an activity feed that keeps the team informed on the order status at all times, which helps set milestones to ensure on-time delivery and identify internal bottlenecks.
Collaborate with different team members to a project-based chatroom. Finish tasks with one-click responses and built-in actions. Keep all project communications centralized in our collaboration module.
Annotate sample photos to provide precise edits and cut down the back and forth of PDF files.
Brands and factories can easily view production requests, and set, review and sign-off production quotes.
Connect with curated and trustworthy factories by The/Studio. Onboard your own factories and manage all in-network factories in one place.
I created initial prototypes in Figma and conducted user testing with the interviewees to validate our assumptions, iterate on functionality and design, and gather early feedback.
To have interviewees walk through the end-to-end flow in the prototype
To test usability of features that encompass the tasks in sampling and production phases
To test the usability of the one-click response function
To learn user behavior and correct assumptions about the flows
The project creation process revolves around the comprehensive tech pack, which already encompasses all development specifications. As a result, we streamlined the steps and minimized the need for user input and additional questions.
Based on the testing results, we found that during the sample review and editing process, the product developer requires the ability to upload additional reference photos for better clarity and communication.
The updated version enhances findability by allowing users to filter project-based collaborations based on their selection of the factory first, resulting in improved navigation and ease of use.
In the new version, each progress step of an order is explicitly displayed in the table itself, eliminating the need to navigate to the order detail page for tracking purposes.
In the new version, we have introduced the feature of user tagging, allowing users to tag and assign tasks to their team members directly within the chatroom.
Throughout the entire project, the product developers and production team consistently emphasized the importance of having a mobile-friendly platform.
"I need to send the sample edits and the photos from my phone."
To ensure scalability, establishing a design system was crucial to maintain consistency in style and visual language throughout the product. Drawing inspiration from the principles of atomic design, we continuously course-corrected during our weekly meetings and gradually defined our standardized components.
To achieve our launch goals, we had to strike a balance between addressing key user experience (UX) needs and fulfilling business goals.
We prioritized designing the essential features and made decisions on what could be deferred to future iterations.
Ensuring a high-quality product was our utmost priority. We placed great importance on gathering feedback from a diverse range of users and keeping stakeholders informed throughout the process.
Each user interview and testing session offered valuable insights that helped us refine our assumptions and optimize our time and resources effectively.