MercePro is a cutting-edge B2B omnichannel eCommerce management platform designed to streamline and automate the supply chain ecosystem. It provides businesses of all sizes with a centralized solution for inventory management, order fulfillment, and warehouse operations across multiple sales channels. Unlike traditional solutions , MercePro is designed with multi-organization management, role-based access control, and scalable architecture, catering to local business owners and large enterprises alike.

1 - Project Overview

As the sole UX designer, I led the research, architecture, and design of MercePro, ensuring that each business function was streamlined and accessible through an intuitive interface. My goal was to create a seamless and scalable experience that enhances operational efficiency and adapts to business growth.

🔹Timeline

• Project Start: August 2024

• MVP Launch: Planned for April 2025, with an MVP built for scalability and flexibility.

✅Sole UX Designer (UX & UI) working on the MVP, ensuring scalability.

✅End-to-End Product Design

✅Collaborated with Backend & Frontend Developers

✅ Reported Directly to the Director

✅Supervised by a Senior UX Designer for UI refinement.

✅Worked in an Agile environment.

2 - My Role

As the sole UX Designer for this project, I played a critical role in shaping MercePro’s user experience and interface, ensuring scalability while focusing on usability, efficiency, and intuitive workflows.

3 - My End-to-End UX Strategy & Design Contributions

✅Conducting in-depth competitive analysis to understand market gaps and opportunities.

✅Structuring process flows and their respective data fields to ensure seamless operations.

✅Creating Task flows and Data Flow Diagrams for key operations like order processing, inventory updates, and role-based interactions.

✅Creating user personas and sitemaps to guide feature prioritization and module sequencing.

✅Designing a comprehensive design system, including a color palette, typography, and UI components aligned with brand identity.

✅Developing high-fidelity UI designs, prototypes, and micro-interactions to enhance user engagement.

✅Collaborating closely with backend and frontend developers, reporting directly to the Director, and being supervised by a Senior UX Designer for UI consistency.

My work involved:

4 - Industry Insights & Competitive Analysis

Rather than relying solely on traditional user research methods, I collaborated with stakeholders who have deep industry experience, including our directors and their network of merchants, logistics managers, and business partners. Their firsthand experience with existing eCommerce tools helped uncover critical pain points, inefficiencies, and gaps in current solutions.

🔍Industry Insights

Once these insights were gathered, I conducted a Competitive Analysis to understand how existing platforms addressed (or failed to address) these challenges, which helped shape the product strategy.

This industry-backed approach allowed me to:
✅ Define user needs early on without assumptions.
✅ Prioritize key workflows and pain points based on real-world challenges.
✅ Identify opportunities for differentiation by analyzing competitors like Linnworks, Uniware and eSwap etc.

🔍Competitive Analysis

To build on industry insights, I conducted an in-depth Competitive Analysis of leading inventory and order management platforms, including Uniware, Linnworks, eSwap, Sellbrite, Sellbery, and Zoho. The objective was to evaluate their strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning, particularly in areas critical for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

🔹 Core Features & Limitations – What functionalities they offer and where they fall short.

🔹 User Experience & Accessibility – How intuitive and scalable their platforms are.

🔹 Customization & Scalability – How adaptable their solutions are for growing businesses.

This comparative study not only validated the key challenges identified in our industry research but also helped shape MercePro’s product strategy, ensuring we addressed critical gaps while offering a more scalable and user-friendly alternative.

Through this analysis, I examined:

📌Key Insights & Pain Points Identified:

1️⃣ Catering to Local Businesses

• Solutions like Linnworks, eSwap, and Uniware are often feature-heavy but too complex for small and local businesses.

• Many platforms prioritize enterprise-level functionality, leaving local businesses struggling with unnecessary complexity.

2️⃣ Complex Onboarding & Setup

• Most platforms require a steep learning curve with unintuitive onboarding experiences.

• These solutions aren’t tailored for SMBs, making it hard for teams to quickly adopt them without disruption.

3️⃣ Lack of Team Collaboration & Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

• Many systems don’t support seamless team collaboration, leading to siloed operations.

• No structured RBAC—users either have too much or too little control, causing inefficiencies.

4️⃣ Limited Flexibility in Multi-Organization Management

• Managing multiple businesses or locations is often a challenge.

• Existing tools force users to juggle multiple accounts, limiting scalability and operational efficiency.

Through this competitive analysis, I uncovered major gaps that existing platforms fail to address, particularly for local businesses and SMBs:

6 - Understanding the Problem

While eCommerce businesses require robust inventory and order management, existing solutions often fail to meet the needs of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) due to:

🔹 Complexity Over Simplicity: Platforms like Uniware, Linnworks, and eSwap are feature-heavy but overwhelming for local businesses that need intuitive, easy-to-use tools.
🔹 Cumbersome Onboarding: Most tools have steep learning curves, requiring significant time and effort before businesses can fully adopt them.
🔹 Lack of Role-Based Access & Team Collaboration: Many platforms do not support structured team collaboration, leading to fragmented operations and inefficiencies.
🔹 Limited Multi-Organization Management: Businesses operating multiple brands or locations struggle with platforms that lack seamless multi-account management.

7 - MercePro: A Simpler, Scalable Solution for eCommerce Management

✅ Smarter Operations – Optimized workflows that reduce inefficiencies and streamline business processes.
✅ Simpler User Experience – A thoughtfully designed interface tailored to real-world business needs, minimizing onboarding time and improving usability.
✅ Scalable for Growth – Whether managing a single store or multiple organizations, MercePro adapts seamlessly as businesses expand.

That’s where MercePro makes a difference.

The eCommerce landscape is rapidly evolving, and businesses—especially small and medium-sized enterprises—need a management solution that is intuitive, efficient, and scalable. Existing platforms often come with unnecessary complexities, steep learning curves, and limited flexibility, making them difficult to adopt and scale.

By bridging critical gaps in Products , inventory, order and warehouse management, MercePro empowers businesses with an all-in-one solution to take control of their operations, improve team collaboration, and scale with confidence in the ever-evolving eCommerce landscape.

Before defining user roles, I needed to structure data fields and workflows to ensure that MercePro could handle real-world business operations efficiently.

8 - Structuring Data Fields & Business Processes

🔹 Steps Taken:
✔ Defined data categories: Product, Inventory, Orders, Finance, Customer Support.
✔ Mapped out business processes: Stock management, order fulfillment, payments, logistics.
✔ Ensured scalability by designing a framework that could accommodate future feature expansions.

To visualize business processes and system interactions, I created task flows and data flow diagrams for key operations like order processing, inventory updates, and role-based interactions.

9 - Task Flows &

Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs)

✔ Step-by-step breakdown of how tasks are completed by different roles.
✔ Optimized workflows to eliminate unnecessary steps.
✔ Helped define permissions for different roles in later stages.

📌Task Flows

📌Data Flows

✔ Illustrated how data moves between different modules.
✔ Helped developers understand system dependencies and integrations.
✔ Ensured that the UI design aligns with backend logic.

With a clear understanding of business processes, I created 10 detailed role-based personas to define who will use MercePro and how. Unlike consumer-facing applications, MercePro requires task-oriented personas that align with role-based access (RBAC) to ensure seamless permissions management and efficient workflows.

10 - User Personas & Role-Based Access

📌Persona Development Approach

✔ Data-Driven Personas: Based on research into real-world eCommerce operations and competitive analysis.
✔ Task-Oriented Design: Focused on daily responsibilities and key actions each role performs.
✔ Scalable Role Mapping: Ensured that permissions align with multi-organization support and business scalability.

📌Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

✔ Admin acts as the master controller, with the ability to impersonate any role.
✔ Role-Specific permissions and Dashboards: Users only see relevant data and tasks.

📌 Impact of Personas on Design

🔹 Helped structure role-specific dashboards and workflows.
🔹 Ensured that each role has access to the right data and features.
🔹 Guided the information architecture (IA) and sitemap design for multi-organization management.

With personas and workflows defined, I structured the navigation system to provide clear, role-specific access to different modules.

11 - Information Architecture & Sitemap

✔ Master Control Panel: Centralized access to all functionalities.
✔ Multi-Organization Management: Easily switch between businesses.
✔ Global Search: Find products, orders, customers, and settings.

✔ Tailored to each persona’s daily tasks.
✔ Minimal cognitive load with streamlined navigation.

🔹 Admin Sitemap

🔹 Role-Specific Sitemaps

12 - Design Decisions & Future Scalability

Before moving into wireframing, several strategic design decisions were made collaboratively to align with the product’s goals, user needs, and long-term scalability. However, as the UX Designer, I took the lead in defining the visual and interaction design approach to ensure a seamless and intuitive experience.

📌 UI Strategy: Balancing Familiarity & Customization

To ensure an intuitive user experience, I analyzed widely adopted B2B platforms such as Uniware, eSwap, Zoho, Dukaan, Razorpay and other enterprise tools, studying their UI structures, navigation patterns, and usability principles. This helped me identify industry-standard design elements that users are already familiar with, reducing the learning curve.

At the same time, I customized the UI to align with MercePro’s unique UX requirements and adopted our brand colors to create a cohesive identity. The goal was to blend familiarity with innovation, making the platform user-friendly yet tailored to our business needs.

To streamline development in this large-scale project, we leveraged the Fuse Angular template as a foundation, ensuring consistency and accelerating the front-end build. I refined the UI components and design system to seamlessly integrate with our branding and functionality, maintaining a balance between usability, scalability, and development feasibility.

📌Material Design Guidelines: My UX-Driven Decision

To maintain consistency, usability, and scalability, I chose to follow Material Design principles, focusing on:

✔ Clarity & Hierarchy – Ensuring key actions and critical data remain prominent.
✔ Scalability – Establishing a structured design system that supports future enhancements.
✔ Familiarity – Aligning with widely recognized UI patterns to reduce the learning curve.

This decision provided a robust design foundation, ensuring that as MercePro evolves, the interface remains intuitive, adaptable, and scalable while adhering to industry best practices.

The MercePro logo and color palette (#121245 for "Merce" and #2FBEC5 for "Pro") were pre-defined before I joined the project. While I did not influence these branding decisions, I ensured that the UI design complemented the brand identity by:

📌Visual Identity & Branding Integration

✔ Applying the brand colors strategically across the interface to create a cohesive and professional look.
✔ Maintaining optimal contrast and readability to enhance usability.
✔ Balancing aesthetics with functional clarity, ensuring that UI elements remain intuitive while reinforcing brand recognition.

This approach helped align the platform’s visual identity with its functional goals while preserving accessibility and user engagement.

#121245

#2FBEC5

✔ Desktop-First Approach – Prioritizing B2B users who manage complex workflows.
✔ Admin-Only MVP – Launching with full admin control before expanding role-based access.
✔ Light Mode First – Ensuring readability before introducing dark mode in future iterations.
✔ Skipping Warehouse Management Initially – Accelerating launch without disrupting core operations.

📌Team-Driven Decisions: Platform Strategy & MVP Scope

Beyond UI and interaction design, the broader product strategy and release plan were collaborative efforts:

📌Integrating UX into Agile Development

✔ Module-Based Sprints – UX and development ran parallel, focusing on one module at a time for efficiency.
✔ Regular Feedback Loops – Frequent design reviews with developers and stakeholders helped refine workflows.
✔ Iterative Enhancements – Early usability testing and feedback informed design refinements before development.

By integrating UX-driven design principles with strategic product decisions, MercePro is positioned for a smooth MVP rollout while maintaining a strong foundation for future growth.

To align design with development, we adopted an Agile approach, breaking down the UX process into sprints based on core modules. Each sprint included research, wireframing, UI design, and developer handoff, ensuring an iterative workflow.

Once the architecture was finalized, I started designing wireframes and prototypes to test usability and refine interactions.

13 - Wireframing & UI Designs

✔ Focused on layout, information placement, and task flows.
✔ Iterated based on early feedback to refine navigation and workflows.

📌Low-Fidelity Wireframes

✔ Developed a cohesive design system with brand-aligned colors, typography, and UI components.
✔ Ensured consistency across modules with scalable, reusable elements.
✔ Built interactive prototypes with micro-interactions to enhance usability.

📌High-Fidelity UI & Design System

14 - Prototyping & Micro Interactions

15 - Overcoming Challenges with a Strategic Approach

🔹 Challenge: Ensuring AI-Assisted Design Decisions Aligned with Real User Needs

While working on task flows, data flow diagrams, sitemaps, information architecture, UX writing, and other design components, I used AI tools like ChatGPT to streamline brainstorming and generate structured insights. However, AI-generated responses often had location-specific biases or lacked deep contextual relevance to my users' needs.
✅ Solution:

• Cross-verified AI-generated outputs using data triangulation, comparing them with competitor research, stakeholder inputs, and industry standards.

• Applied my domain expertise to refine, validate, and adapt responses, ensuring they truly addressed MercePro's user base and business model.

• Made UX writing more user-friendly, ensuring AI-generated text used simple, industry-standard terminology that my users could easily understand.

• Maintained an eye for detail, manually fine-tuning structures to ensure they aligned with real-world user workflows, avoiding generic or misaligned recommendations.

This approach allowed me to accelerate ideation while preserving accuracy, relevance, and a user-first mindset in every design decision.

🔹 Challenge: Managing Multiple Organizations in One Account
✅ Solution: Enabled seamless switching between businesses with a structured multi-org dashboard.

🔹 Challenge: Designing for Agile Development
✅ Solution: Created modular, reusable components to support iterative development.

🔹 Challenge: Verifying & Validating the UX Strategy to Ensure We’re on the Right Track

✅ Solution: Before finalizing workflows, I took a structured approach to validate that our data fields, information architecture, navigation, and role-based access aligned with real-world business needs. Instead of making assumptions, I:

• Analyzed competitor documentation & videos to understand how leading platforms structured their processes.

• Created a comprehensive "How-To" question framework covering key user actions (e.g., "How will a user create & fulfill an order?" "How will role-based access impact daily operations?").

• Used these questions as a checklist to cross-check every design decision—ensuring that workflows, permissions, and system interactions functioned as intended.

• Verified system logic proactively during the design phase to minimize usability issues later.

Designing a large-scale B2B omnichannel platform like MercePro came with several challenges, requiring a mix of critical thinking, iterative problem-solving, and deep user understanding. Each challenge tested my ability to balance usability, scalability, and business requirements while ensuring a seamless user experience.

By leveraging a combination of industry best practices, competitive analysis, user research, and AI-driven insights, I was able to navigate these complexities effectively. However, AI tools, including ChatGPT, required careful validation to align responses with my target users' behaviors, business operations, and contextual accuracy.

Below are some key challenges I encountered and how I tackled them:

🔹 Challenge: Creating a Scalable Role-Based System
✅ Solution: Designed an Admin-first architecture allowing impersonation and flexible role assignments.

16 - Final Thoughts & Key Learnings

📌 Bridging Technology & Business Strategy – With a Computer Science background and a PhD in Management, I was able to blend technical understanding with business acumen, ensuring that every UX decision aligned with both user needs and operational efficiency. This helped me navigate complex business requirements while designing a scalable and structured platform.

📌 Cross-Functional Collaboration & Agile Execution – Worked closely with backend & frontend developers, directly reporting to the Director while refining UI with a Senior UX Designer. I ensured seamless communication between design and development, aligning sprints based on modular feature design to maintain an efficient Agile workflow.

📌 Scalable UX Decisions & Data-Driven Validation – Rather than relying on assumptions, I took a research-backed approach by creating "How-to" validation questions that cross-checked MercePro’s data fields, workflows, and role-based structures. This ensured that every component functioned as expected before implementation, reducing errors and rework.

📌 Understanding B2B User Needs & Designing for Growth – I crafted role-based workflows that balanced powerful enterprise features with ease of use, ensuring that even complex operations felt intuitive. By structuring a modular and scalable UX, MercePro is well-positioned for future feature expansions and evolving business needs.

17 - Impact & Takeaways

✅ Designed a scalable, role-based UX for B2B eCommerce.
✅ Built an adaptive multi-organization system, setting MercePro apart from competitors.
✅ Crafted a cohesive design system with high usability and future scalability.
✅ Contributed to a product launching in April 2025, designed for B2B enterprises.

18 - What’s Next

🔹 Usability Testing & Iterations
🔹 Enhancing Customization Options
🔹 Continuous UI Refinements for Future Features