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Designing a Content Management System for the Beverage Alcohol Industry

Case Study of designing a CMS

The Problem

An aggregated marketplace with 1M+ unique product SKUs and 300K+ trade professionals in the alcohol beverage industry. Buying establishments have the ability to search products and create orders, but at the beginning of 2020 Distributor and Supplier did not have the ability to control any product messaging and communicate their brand identity within the marketplace which became an additional concern with the added industry stress from covid.

The Solution

A self-serve content management system allowing customers to add, edit, and create promotional content within the aggregated marketplace.

The Team

  • 3 marketer
  • 3 product managers
  • 3 devs
  • 1 senior product designer 👋

My Role

User research
  • Conducting user interviews
  • Customer segmentation
  • Identified user needs
  • Mapping user journeys
  • Market research
Designing
  • Wireframing
  • Information architecturing
  • High-fidelity mockups
  • Prototyping
Product strategy
  • Project roadmapping
  • Score impact/effort of features
  • Agile project breakdown
Testing
  • Usability testing
  • A/B testing
  • QA

Discovery & User Research

As a team we spent time researching our existing customers as well as prospects to evaluate marketplace viability. Using surveying to collect and assess attitudes, we were able to segment types of customers for qualitative research.

User Research

Gathering behavioral insights was the core of the research I conducted. My goal was to understand how our customers communicated their products and brand to buyers. I created conceptual mockups to help participants walk through hypothetical scenarios and recorded any need or problem to assess trends among our segmented groups.

Translating Research into Needs

Using trends from the interviews combined with findings analyzed from our customers' newsletters, websites, and social media content, I grouped and prioritized our users' core needs. I translated those needs into designs and categorized each feature in a ranking matrix of importance for the engineers and product team to analyze.

Ideation & Designing

While the feature library was in review, I designed the information architecture and used wireframes to illustrate how a user could edit, add, update and delete content. This part of the process was helpful for the engineering team to determine what was and was not possible to build with our codebase.

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