One of my longest running clients, ShipCompliant, enables wine and spirits producers, importers, marketers and wholesalers to distribute their products legally and efficiently within the US market through the use of a suite of tools, with the web-based crown jewel app being ShipCompliant itself. Effectively, they ensure that wine and spirit shipments are compliant with the otherwise impractical to track and manage overlapping web of city, county, state and federal laws governing the sale of alcohol.
The Problem
Having worked with their team over the years in refining the tools available we knew this day was coming for a while. Much of the UX/UI work done up to this point were band-aids to attempt to corral features that had often times been added to the system without an awful lot of thought as to how they would fit into the overall experience. so it was a landscape that was rapidly becoming a patchwork of user interface modes and models requiring a great deal of user effort to interpret and use.
The Process
To a large degree this had been thought about and scoped for ages so it was really a matter of deciding what tools we wanted to use and what sort of UX model we were to adopt to most effectively serve the ShipCompliant users as well as allow for a great deal of flexibility with the tool as it grows and new features are adopted. The engineering team drove the decision of the back end toolset and I adapted that to the UI needs. I also created a common language for the controls that would unify all of the various implementations throughout the UI, not to mention allow for facets to be sub-branded as needed for state clients with a minimum effort.
The Solution
Considering that the final layout and portal tools haven’t much changed in the intervening 3 years, and that there has been a significant drop off in support requests related to the app, it would appear that the UI upgrades have been a success!
