Platform
Android & iOS
Project Type
Solo Designer
My Role
Lead UX Designer
Tools
Figma, FigJam
Timeline
Mar 2024 – Feb 2025
Intro
Usana is going through a transition phase in 2024 where they’re starting to leverage more data in the digital products they create (which is great! 🎉). With this data we’re trying to surface relevant information and actions that will help our users complete common tasks more quickly or simply. For Associates that might mean product recommendations to give their friends, and Affiliates might want to know the commissions they’re earning from the products they share on social media. These are the types of things we were looking to build in our dashboard experiences in our 2 mobile apps.
LoFi
Because we already have some of these helpful tools established on our web experiences, my role was to figure out how to take the web experience and design it for an app. This could include things to leave out entirely, improvements to the existing tools, or additional tools that we hadn’t explored yet.
Workshop Exploration
Before I started diving in to any sketching or low fidelity designs of any kind I wanted to gather ideas and understand expectations from the other people involved in the project. So we kicked it off with a little workshop. 👇
These types of workshops are something I had always wanted to do since starting at Usana, but we hadn’t. So in late 2023 I worked with a few key stakeholders to hold our first one and it was a huge success! That one was part of the product sharing design project which you can read about here. Everyone loved it so much that they were asking me to put together another one for this project, which was amazing! So we did.
Workshop Takeaways
What this workshop revealed to me most was that there was still a lot of confusion and disagreement about our overall app strategy. Unfortunately, that played in to the conversation about dashboards because they were most likely going to exist in both apps in different ways to meet different user groups.
Information Architecture
After the workshop I tried to continue understanding what next steps we could take even if the app strategy was still a bit messy. I started at a high level of flows and information architecture to see if we could align at that level.
I mapped out all 3 user types and thought a lot about the differences we might want to consider for each one. I did this so that I could understand the entire experience holistically and so that I would explain to the other stakeholders why certain approaches might be a better match for each user types needs and behaviors. Below is the sketches and notes I used to have those conversations.
I tried to keep it really basic and focus on the core navigational elements and features that might be best to focus on for our initial launch of dashboards. Thankfully, it was as huge success! Everyone agreed with the core concepts and together we were able to improve on the ideas I shared and make them even more solid.
Wireframe Sketches
After getting a solid understanding of the current experience and how to adjust it I started to show stakeholders and the mobile developers the strongest options so that we could explore even deeper. The goal of these conversations is to understand what technical requirements or business needs I might have missed and for me to explain why certain things will improve the user experience over others. Together we align on the direction that best matches technical constraints, business needs, and user experience. Here’s a few more images from our exploration:
Using my sketches as the conversational focal point with the developers and other stakeholders we were able to start aligning on the tools and info we wanted to highlight for both user types and move in to HiFi design conversations.
HiFi
After we aligned on the core concepts through rough sketches and flows, we moved into higher fidelity designs for the things that we’re going to be prioritized for the launch of this new app experience.
Here’s what some of the core pieces of the experience turned out like for the Associate user type.
Because UX Design is still relatively new at Usana I try to stick with as many foundational UX principles and patterns possible so that we have a strong foundation built. I hope in the future that foundation can be used to explore more nuanced and unique digital experiences at Usana, but we’ve gone far in the last couple years!
Along the way we continued to refine, ask questions, and dive deeper into the smaller details until we felt comfortable starting development. And although the dev team was included less in these conversations than we usually have them, we made sure to check as many technical details with them before tickets were created and the dev work begun.
Delivery
These are some of the delivered designs along with notes about behaviors and interactions to help the devs as they build. These notes contained the things we discussed and aligned on during our technical reviews with the devs and other stakeholders.
One of the biggest challenges we ran into with the Associate dashboard was trying to figure out how to improve our communications around commissions. Our commission qualification rules for Associate’s are actually very complicated, and in the past Usana has pushed the complexity off on the user instead of taking it on as a design challenge. Read about how I took on that challenge here. Because it’s part of the dashboards though, I’ll include a reference below of the delivered designs.
Outro
The dashboard project happened during a very challenging time at Usana for many different reasons. The app strategy was murky, we were going through internal changes and redefining roles, and still trying to keep development moving while working towards these future enhancements.
While I certainly wouldn’t have chosen these conditions, I’m really satisfied with the outcomes that we created, the relationships we strengthened and the things we learned together. Through it all I was also able to continue pushing for UX best practices and helping the organization level up in their ability to engage in those practices. I’m very excited for people to start using these features in 2025.