An Inside Look at Our UI/UX Design Process

UI & UXDESIGN PROCESS

Elumalai JayaramanUX Designer

Zoho Finance Team

https://www.zoho.com/inventory/

We recently launched Zoho Inventory, our inventory and order management

solution.

We're definitely learning a lot as we expand our suite of products. Our goal is to

not only ensure that each product is fantastic to use, but also to make the

experience consistent across products. This is important because our products

are designed from the ground up to work together and to be used with each

other.

Let's see how we accomplished this for https://www.zoho.com/inventory/.

A unified, consistent experience across products.

In my previous article about how we redesigned https://www.zoho.com/books/,

our online accounting solution, I talked about how we improved the overall UX

through lots of experimentation and learning.

Zoho Inventory, on first glance, looks a lot like Zoho Books. That’s because we

designed it that way. We used the same basic design skeleton and built upwards

from there. This design style persists across many of our products: Zoho Invoice: https://www.zoho.com/invoice/

Zoho Books: https://www.zoho.com/books/

Zoho Subscriptions: https://www.zoho.com/subscriptions/

And Zoho Expense: https://www.zoho.com/expense/

This uniform design provides a level of UX and visual consistency across products

that you simply will not find when you integrate independent solutions from

different providers.

a) Identifying the key design challenge.

The very first thing we needed to do was to ask the key question: What problems

are we trying to solve? Problem-oriented thinking provides structure to the

entire design process. Once you start thinking in terms of problems, the specific

solutions will automatically follow.

For Zoho Inventory, the entire inventory and order management process is

centered around managing sales orders and purchase orders. There’s a lot of

complexity here. For example, sales orders contain a lot of information. Imagine

you order some items from a marketplace like Amazon. If you’re ordering a lot of

items, the seller can’t ship all of them at the same time. Depending on various

factors, like the size limit of the package and the availability of different items,

some boxes may be shipped at different times.

The seller needs to keep track of which of those items have been invoiced, which

have been paid for, and which have been shipped. Multiple items are often placed

into a single package, while there are also orders with multiple packages for

different sets of items. All of these things need to be tracked.

Before we started designing the UX to solve these problems, we first needed

deeper insights into how business owners and inventory managers approached

these problems in the real world.

b) Stepping into the shoes of the user.

You can’t build a great car without knowing how to drive.

Similarly, you can’t build a great user experience without knowing exactly what

users want.

You need to get all that background information long before you start putting pen

to paper (or cursor to screen). Only then will you be actually designing something

that’s nice to use and allows the user to get things done as quickly as possible.

Luckily, we had all the background information we needed before we started

designing the interface for Zoho Inventory. We’ve been running Zoho Books and

Zoho CRM for many years, and we’ve had numerous requests for an inventory

management solution that ties right into these products.

Here’s just one example of a customer asking for an inventory management

solution on our forums over 4 years ago. We’ve gotten hundreds of such requests

over the years.

A customer requesting a product to manage their inventory.

These requests provided a treasure trove of information. We got a peek directly

into hundreds of real-world scenarios and problems that needed solving by a

dedicated inventory management solution. All this experience meant that we had

a very good idea of what kind of software that our users would like before we

even started the design process.

Plus, months before we released Zoho Inventory, we opened up an early-access

version of the product for over 700 users.

The feedback was golden.

We’d never have gotten these insights by working on the UX using only internal

feedback from design and management. You need user feedback to design a

great user experience.

It is easier to talk than to listen. Pay attention to your clients, your users, your readers, and your friends. Your design will get better as you listen to other people.— ELLEN LUPTON

c) Getting some structure: Designing the Information Architecture and wireframing.

We’ve seen that inventory managers need to handle a high level of informational

complexity when it comes to managing orders. There’s lots to track and manage

to make sure everything is going smoothly.

The goal with designing the interface was to empower the user to handle all this

information and take action on it quickly.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.

— TOM & DAVID KELLEY

This process starts with designing an information architecture — this is basically a

representation of all information that needs to be tracked by the user, and

how it should be organized hierarchically.

For order management, this is the basic information that the user has to

track:

Items: Number of items, quantity

Packages: Number of packages, items in the packages,

status of package: packed, shipped or delivered

Invoices: Number of invoices, packages/items in the invoices,

status of invoice: sent, fully paid, partially paid, overdue

It’s pretty simple, but this is the essence of the information architecture,

and it’s a good illustration of the complexity and the infinite number of use

cases that the user will have to handle.

For example, a sales order can have ten different items, and these items

are packaged into three different packages (taking weight into account) and

one invoice is issued for one package while another invoice is issued for the

other two packages. And there will be lots of different sales orders with

very different configurations. The final interface should allow the user to

handle and take action on all of this information.

Putting together a complete wireframe was important because there can be

a lot of things to think about, a lot of individual use cases to solve for. A

wireframe puts a structure to all the fragmented problems and thought

processes running through the designer’s head.

With the information architecture in place, we put together a wireframe

that allowed easy access to all relevant information in a sales order, and

any action you need to take can be done right from within the above

interface.

Wireframe for the Zoho Inventory order management screen.

d) Nailing the visual design.

Visual design is exceedingly important to a product’s success. Why? First

impressions matter. Studies have shown that users form opinions based on

visual design in less than 50 milliseconds. Plus, first impressions are

persistent. It’s very hard to shake that first impression you create with a

customer.

A visually appealing design primes the user for good expectations even

before they start using your product. Once that first impression is created,

the user leans toward viewing the entire product through a positive lens.

It’s important to have a consistent visual experience as well. Good design

has to extend right from your website to your entire product in order to

maintain that positive impression.

With all this in mind, and after much experimentation, we carefully put

together the above visual design for Zoho Inventory. Now, since visual

design is a creative process there’s no definite set of steps to designing

something that looks good. However, we decided to use basic visual design

principles as guidelines to structure our process.

Here are the things we took into account:

TYPOGRAPHY: Readability of UI elements is one of the basic things that you

need to ensure. We have been using the Proxima Nova font so far in many

of our products. We carried this over to Zoho Inventory and it worked out

beautifully.

COLOR SCHEME: Choosing the right color scheme is like dressing up really

well. When people have nothing else to go on, they will immediately judge

you based on what you’re wearing. If you want that kind of judgement in

your favor when people look at and use your product, it’s important to

choose a color scheme that is visually appealing.

While for many of our products (such as Zoho Books), we went for a

pastel-style color scheme, we did something different with Zoho Inventory,

going for a dark and flat color scheme that mixed elements of black and

blue. This gave it a clean, professional look.

ICONS: Icons play a role of giving important visual information which text by

itself cannot achieve. We needed to choose icons that were not only

meaningful, but complemented the rest of the design choices.

We had a debate in our design team about whether to choose hollow icons

or solid icons. We ended up choosing a set of hollow icons which we

concluded were better for representing real-world objects such as items and

packages (which inventory managers have to deal with everyday) than solid

icons were.

VISUAL HIERARCHY: While the layout, hierarchy and grouping of different

elements were decided in the wireframing process, we needed to visually

distinguish these elements in the visual design stage so that the user could

know where to find what. Plus, we needed to make the most important

elements stand out, so that they were more visually accessible.

For example, the aforementioned informational complexity in each sales

order had to be handled carefully by visually distinguishing each and every

element. This involved subtle changes in color, font and style so that

elements were distinct and separate and did not blend with each other.

We recently launched Zoho Inventory, our inventory and order management

solution.

We're definitely learning a lot as we expand our suite of products. Our goal is to

not only ensure that each product is fantastic to use, but also to make the

experience consistent across products. This is important because our products

are designed from the ground up to work together and to be used with each

other.

Let's see how we accomplished this for https://www.zoho.com/inventory/.

A unified, consistent experience across products.

In my previous article about how we redesigned https://www.zoho.com/books/,

our online accounting solution, I talked about how we improved the overall UX

through lots of experimentation and learning.

Zoho Inventory, on first glance, looks a lot like Zoho Books. That’s because we

designed it that way. We used the same basic design skeleton and built upwards

from there. This design style persists across many of our products: Zoho Invoice: https://www.zoho.com/invoice/

Zoho Books: https://www.zoho.com/books/

Zoho Subscriptions: https://www.zoho.com/subscriptions/

And Zoho Expense: https://www.zoho.com/expense/

This uniform design provides a level of UX and visual consistency across products

that you simply will not find when you integrate independent solutions from

different providers.

a) Identifying the key design challenge.

The very first thing we needed to do was to ask the key question: What problems

are we trying to solve? Problem-oriented thinking provides structure to the

entire design process. Once you start thinking in terms of problems, the specific

solutions will automatically follow.

For Zoho Inventory, the entire inventory and order management process is

centered around managing sales orders and purchase orders. There’s a lot of

complexity here. For example, sales orders contain a lot of information. Imagine

you order some items from a marketplace like Amazon. If you’re ordering a lot of

items, the seller can’t ship all of them at the same time. Depending on various

factors, like the size limit of the package and the availability of different items,

some boxes may be shipped at different times.

The seller needs to keep track of which of those items have been invoiced, which

have been paid for, and which have been shipped. Multiple items are often placed

into a single package, while there are also orders with multiple packages for

different sets of items. All of these things need to be tracked.

Before we started designing the UX to solve these problems, we first needed

deeper insights into how business owners and inventory managers approached

these problems in the real world.

b) Stepping into the shoes of the user.

You can’t build a great car without knowing how to drive.

Similarly, you can’t build a great user experience without knowing exactly what

users want.

You need to get all that background information long before you start putting pen

to paper (or cursor to screen). Only then will you be actually designing something

that’s nice to use and allows the user to get things done as quickly as possible.

Luckily, we had all the background information we needed before we started

designing the interface for Zoho Inventory. We’ve been running Zoho Books and

Zoho CRM for many years, and we’ve had numerous requests for an inventory

management solution that ties right into these products.

Here’s just one example of a customer asking for an inventory management

solution on our forums over 4 years ago. We’ve gotten hundreds of such requests

over the years.

A customer requesting a product to manage their inventory.

These requests provided a treasure trove of information. We got a peek directly

into hundreds of real-world scenarios and problems that needed solving by a

dedicated inventory management solution. All this experience meant that we had

a very good idea of what kind of software that our users would like before we

even started the design process.

Plus, months before we released Zoho Inventory, we opened up an early-access

version of the product for over 700 users.

The feedback was golden.

We’d never have gotten these insights by working on the UX using only internal

feedback from design and management. You need user feedback to design a

great user experience.

It is easier to talk than to listen. Pay attention to your clients, your users, your readers, and your friends. Your design will get better as you listen to other people.— ELLEN LUPTON

c) Getting some structure: Designing the Information Architecture and wireframing.

We’ve seen that inventory managers need to handle a high level of informational

complexity when it comes to managing orders. There’s lots to track and manage

to make sure everything is going smoothly.

The goal with designing the interface was to empower the user to handle all this

information and take action on it quickly.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.

— TOM & DAVID KELLEY

This process starts with designing an information architecture — this is basically a

representation of all information that needs to be tracked by the user, and

how it should be organized hierarchically.

For order management, this is the basic information that the user has to

track:

Items: Number of items, quantity

Packages: Number of packages, items in the packages,

status of package: packed, shipped or delivered

Invoices: Number of invoices, packages/items in the invoices,

status of invoice: sent, fully paid, partially paid, overdue

It’s pretty simple, but this is the essence of the information architecture,

and it’s a good illustration of the complexity and the infinite number of use

cases that the user will have to handle.

For example, a sales order can have ten different items, and these items

are packaged into three different packages (taking weight into account) and

one invoice is issued for one package while another invoice is issued for the

other two packages. And there will be lots of different sales orders with

very different configurations. The final interface should allow the user to

handle and take action on all of this information.

Putting together a complete wireframe was important because there can be

a lot of things to think about, a lot of individual use cases to solve for. A

wireframe puts a structure to all the fragmented problems and thought

processes running through the designer’s head.

With the information architecture in place, we put together a wireframe

that allowed easy access to all relevant information in a sales order, and

any action you need to take can be done right from within the above

interface.

Wireframe for the Zoho Inventory order management screen.

d) Nailing the visual design.

Visual design is exceedingly important to a product’s success. Why? First

impressions matter. Studies have shown that users form opinions based on

visual design in less than 50 milliseconds. Plus, first impressions are

persistent. It’s very hard to shake that first impression you create with a

customer.

The Design ProcessA visually appealing design primes the user for good expectations even

before they start using your product. Once that first impression is created,

the user leans toward viewing the entire product through a positive lens.

It’s important to have a consistent visual experience as well. Good design

has to extend right from your website to your entire product in order to

maintain that positive impression.

With all this in mind, and after much experimentation, we carefully put

together the above visual design for Zoho Inventory. Now, since visual

design is a creative process there’s no definite set of steps to designing

something that looks good. However, we decided to use basic visual design

principles as guidelines to structure our process.

Here are the things we took into account:

TYPOGRAPHY: Readability of UI elements is one of the basic things that you

need to ensure. We have been using the Proxima Nova font so far in many

of our products. We carried this over to Zoho Inventory and it worked out

beautifully.

COLOR SCHEME: Choosing the right color scheme is like dressing up really

well. When people have nothing else to go on, they will immediately judge

you based on what you’re wearing. If you want that kind of judgement in

your favor when people look at and use your product, it’s important to

choose a color scheme that is visually appealing.

While for many of our products (such as Zoho Books), we went for a

pastel-style color scheme, we did something different with Zoho Inventory,

going for a dark and flat color scheme that mixed elements of black and

blue. This gave it a clean, professional look.

ICONS: Icons play a role of giving important visual information which text by

itself cannot achieve. We needed to choose icons that were not only

meaningful, but complemented the rest of the design choices.

We had a debate in our design team about whether to choose hollow icons

or solid icons. We ended up choosing a set of hollow icons which we

concluded were better for representing real-world objects such as items and

packages (which inventory managers have to deal with everyday) than solid

icons were.

VISUAL HIERARCHY: While the layout, hierarchy and grouping of different

elements were decided in the wireframing process, we needed to visually

distinguish these elements in the visual design stage so that the user could

know where to find what. Plus, we needed to make the most important

elements stand out, so that they were more visually accessible.

For example, the aforementioned informational complexity in each sales

order had to be handled carefully by visually distinguishing each and every

element. This involved subtle changes in color, font and style so that

elements were distinct and separate and did not blend with each other.

We recently launched Zoho Inventory, our inventory and order management

solution.

We're definitely learning a lot as we expand our suite of products. Our goal is to

not only ensure that each product is fantastic to use, but also to make the

experience consistent across products. This is important because our products

are designed from the ground up to work together and to be used with each

other.

Let's see how we accomplished this for https://www.zoho.com/inventory/.

A unified, consistent experience across products.

In my previous article about how we redesigned https://www.zoho.com/books/,

our online accounting solution, I talked about how we improved the overall UX

through lots of experimentation and learning.

Zoho Inventory, on first glance, looks a lot like Zoho Books. That’s because we

designed it that way. We used the same basic design skeleton and built upwards

from there. This design style persists across many of our products: Zoho Invoice: https://www.zoho.com/invoice/

Zoho Books: https://www.zoho.com/books/

Zoho Subscriptions: https://www.zoho.com/subscriptions/

And Zoho Expense: https://www.zoho.com/expense/

This uniform design provides a level of UX and visual consistency across products

that you simply will not find when you integrate independent solutions from

different providers.

a) Identifying the key design challenge.

The very first thing we needed to do was to ask the key question: What problems

are we trying to solve? Problem-oriented thinking provides structure to the

entire design process. Once you start thinking in terms of problems, the specific

solutions will automatically follow.

For Zoho Inventory, the entire inventory and order management process is

centered around managing sales orders and purchase orders. There’s a lot of

complexity here. For example, sales orders contain a lot of information. Imagine

you order some items from a marketplace like Amazon. If you’re ordering a lot of

items, the seller can’t ship all of them at the same time. Depending on various

factors, like the size limit of the package and the availability of different items,

some boxes may be shipped at different times.

The seller needs to keep track of which of those items have been invoiced, which

have been paid for, and which have been shipped. Multiple items are often placed

into a single package, while there are also orders with multiple packages for

different sets of items. All of these things need to be tracked.

Before we started designing the UX to solve these problems, we first needed

deeper insights into how business owners and inventory managers approached

these problems in the real world.

b) Stepping into the shoes of the user.

You can’t build a great car without knowing how to drive.

Similarly, you can’t build a great user experience without knowing exactly what

users want.

You need to get all that background information long before you start putting pen

to paper (or cursor to screen). Only then will you be actually designing something

that’s nice to use and allows the user to get things done as quickly as possible.

Luckily, we had all the background information we needed before we started

designing the interface for Zoho Inventory. We’ve been running Zoho Books and

Zoho CRM for many years, and we’ve had numerous requests for an inventory

management solution that ties right into these products.

Here’s just one example of a customer asking for an inventory management

solution on our forums over 4 years ago. We’ve gotten hundreds of such requests

over the years.

A customer requesting a product to manage their inventory.

These requests provided a treasure trove of information. We got a peek directly

into hundreds of real-world scenarios and problems that needed solving by a

dedicated inventory management solution. All this experience meant that we had

a very good idea of what kind of software that our users would like before we

even started the design process.

Plus, months before we released Zoho Inventory, we opened up an early-access

version of the product for over 700 users.

The feedback was golden.

We’d never have gotten these insights by working on the UX using only internal

feedback from design and management. You need user feedback to design a

great user experience.

It is easier to talk than to listen. Pay attention to your clients, your users, your readers, and your friends. Your design will get better as you listen to other people.— ELLEN LUPTON

c) Getting some structure: Designing the Information Architecture and wireframing.

We’ve seen that inventory managers need to handle a high level of informational

complexity when it comes to managing orders. There’s lots to track and manage

to make sure everything is going smoothly.

The goal with designing the interface was to empower the user to handle all this

information and take action on it quickly.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.

— TOM & DAVID KELLEY

This process starts with designing an information architecture — this is basically a

representation of all information that needs to be tracked by the user, and

how it should be organized hierarchically.

For order management, this is the basic information that the user has to

track:

Items: Number of items, quantity

Packages: Number of packages, items in the packages,

status of package: packed, shipped or delivered

Invoices: Number of invoices, packages/items in the invoices,

status of invoice: sent, fully paid, partially paid, overdue

It’s pretty simple, but this is the essence of the information architecture,

and it’s a good illustration of the complexity and the infinite number of use

cases that the user will have to handle.

For example, a sales order can have ten different items, and these items

are packaged into three different packages (taking weight into account) and

one invoice is issued for one package while another invoice is issued for the

other two packages. And there will be lots of different sales orders with

very different configurations. The final interface should allow the user to

handle and take action on all of this information.

Putting together a complete wireframe was important because there can be

a lot of things to think about, a lot of individual use cases to solve for. A

wireframe puts a structure to all the fragmented problems and thought

processes running through the designer’s head.

With the information architecture in place, we put together a wireframe

that allowed easy access to all relevant information in a sales order, and

any action you need to take can be done right from within the above

interface.

Wireframe for the Zoho Inventory order management screen.

d) Nailing the visual design.

Visual design is exceedingly important to a product’s success. Why? First

impressions matter. Studies have shown that users form opinions based on

visual design in less than 50 milliseconds. Plus, first impressions are

persistent. It’s very hard to shake that first impression you create with a

customer.

A visually appealing design primes the user for good expectations even

before they start using your product. Once that first impression is created,

the user leans toward viewing the entire product through a positive lens.

It’s important to have a consistent visual experience as well. Good design

has to extend right from your website to your entire product in order to

maintain that positive impression.

With all this in mind, and after much experimentation, we carefully put

together the above visual design for Zoho Inventory. Now, since visual

design is a creative process there’s no definite set of steps to designing

something that looks good. However, we decided to use basic visual design

principles as guidelines to structure our process.

Here are the things we took into account:

TYPOGRAPHY: Readability of UI elements is one of the basic things that you

need to ensure. We have been using the Proxima Nova font so far in many

of our products. We carried this over to Zoho Inventory and it worked out

beautifully.

COLOR SCHEME: Choosing the right color scheme is like dressing up really

well. When people have nothing else to go on, they will immediately judge

you based on what you’re wearing. If you want that kind of judgement in

your favor when people look at and use your product, it’s important to

choose a color scheme that is visually appealing.

While for many of our products (such as Zoho Books), we went for a

pastel-style color scheme, we did something different with Zoho Inventory,

going for a dark and flat color scheme that mixed elements of black and

blue. This gave it a clean, professional look.

ICONS: Icons play a role of giving important visual information which text by

itself cannot achieve. We needed to choose icons that were not only

meaningful, but complemented the rest of the design choices.

We had a debate in our design team about whether to choose hollow icons

or solid icons. We ended up choosing a set of hollow icons which we

concluded were better for representing real-world objects such as items and

packages (which inventory managers have to deal with everyday) than solid

icons were.

VISUAL HIERARCHY: While the layout, hierarchy and grouping of different

elements were decided in the wireframing process, we needed to visually

distinguish these elements in the visual design stage so that the user could

know where to find what. Plus, we needed to make the most important

elements stand out, so that they were more visually accessible.

For example, the aforementioned informational complexity in each sales

order had to be handled carefully by visually distinguishing each and every

element. This involved subtle changes in color, font and style so that

elements were distinct and separate and did not blend with each other.

We recently launched Zoho Inventory, our inventory and order management

solution.

We're definitely learning a lot as we expand our suite of products. Our goal is to

not only ensure that each product is fantastic to use, but also to make the

experience consistent across products. This is important because our products

are designed from the ground up to work together and to be used with each

other.

Let's see how we accomplished this for https://www.zoho.com/inventory/.

A unified, consistent experience across products.

In my previous article about how we redesigned https://www.zoho.com/books/,

our online accounting solution, I talked about how we improved the overall UX

through lots of experimentation and learning.

Zoho Inventory, on first glance, looks a lot like Zoho Books. That’s because we

designed it that way. We used the same basic design skeleton and built upwards

from there. This design style persists across many of our products: Zoho Invoice: https://www.zoho.com/invoice/

Zoho Books: https://www.zoho.com/books/

Zoho Subscriptions: https://www.zoho.com/subscriptions/

And Zoho Expense: https://www.zoho.com/expense/

This uniform design provides a level of UX and visual consistency across products

that you simply will not find when you integrate independent solutions from

different providers.

a) Identifying the key design challenge.

The very first thing we needed to do was to ask the key question: What problems

are we trying to solve? Problem-oriented thinking provides structure to the

entire design process. Once you start thinking in terms of problems, the specific

solutions will automatically follow.

For Zoho Inventory, the entire inventory and order management process is

centered around managing sales orders and purchase orders. There’s a lot of

complexity here. For example, sales orders contain a lot of information. Imagine

you order some items from a marketplace like Amazon. If you’re ordering a lot of

items, the seller can’t ship all of them at the same time. Depending on various

factors, like the size limit of the package and the availability of different items,

some boxes may be shipped at different times.

The seller needs to keep track of which of those items have been invoiced, which

have been paid for, and which have been shipped. Multiple items are often placed

into a single package, while there are also orders with multiple packages for

different sets of items. All of these things need to be tracked.

Before we started designing the UX to solve these problems, we first needed

deeper insights into how business owners and inventory managers approached

these problems in the real world.

b) Stepping into the shoes of the user.

You can’t build a great car without knowing how to drive.

Similarly, you can’t build a great user experience without knowing exactly what

users want.

You need to get all that background information long before you start putting pen

to paper (or cursor to screen). Only then will you be actually designing something

that’s nice to use and allows the user to get things done as quickly as possible.

Luckily, we had all the background information we needed before we started

designing the interface for Zoho Inventory. We’ve been running Zoho Books and

Zoho CRM for many years, and we’ve had numerous requests for an inventory

management solution that ties right into these products.

Here’s just one example of a customer asking for an inventory management

solution on our forums over 4 years ago. We’ve gotten hundreds of such requests

over the years.

A customer requesting a product to manage their inventory.

These requests provided a treasure trove of information. We got a peek directly

into hundreds of real-world scenarios and problems that needed solving by a

dedicated inventory management solution. All this experience meant that we had

a very good idea of what kind of software that our users would like before we

even started the design process.

Plus, months before we released Zoho Inventory, we opened up an early-access

version of the product for over 700 users.

The feedback was golden.

We’d never have gotten these insights by working on the UX using only internal

feedback from design and management. You need user feedback to design a

great user experience.

It is easier to talk than to listen. Pay attention to your clients, your users, your readers, and your friends. Your design will get better as you listen to other people.— ELLEN LUPTON

c) Getting some structure: Designing the Information Architecture and wireframing.

We’ve seen that inventory managers need to handle a high level of informational

complexity when it comes to managing orders. There’s lots to track and manage

to make sure everything is going smoothly.

The goal with designing the interface was to empower the user to handle all this

information and take action on it quickly.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.

— TOM & DAVID KELLEY

This process starts with designing an information architecture — this is basically a

representation of all information that needs to be tracked by the user, and

how it should be organized hierarchically.

For order management, this is the basic information that the user has to

track:

Items: Number of items, quantity

Packages: Number of packages, items in the packages,

status of package: packed, shipped or delivered

Invoices: Number of invoices, packages/items in the invoices,

status of invoice: sent, fully paid, partially paid, overdue

It’s pretty simple, but this is the essence of the information architecture,

and it’s a good illustration of the complexity and the infinite number of use

cases that the user will have to handle.

For example, a sales order can have ten different items, and these items

are packaged into three different packages (taking weight into account) and

one invoice is issued for one package while another invoice is issued for the

other two packages. And there will be lots of different sales orders with

very different configurations. The final interface should allow the user to

handle and take action on all of this information.

Putting together a complete wireframe was important because there can be

a lot of things to think about, a lot of individual use cases to solve for. A

wireframe puts a structure to all the fragmented problems and thought

processes running through the designer’s head.

With the information architecture in place, we put together a wireframe

that allowed easy access to all relevant information in a sales order, and

any action you need to take can be done right from within the above

interface.

Wireframe for the Zoho Inventory order management screen.

d) Nailing the visual design.

Visual design is exceedingly important to a product’s success. Why? First

impressions matter. Studies have shown that users form opinions based on

visual design in less than 50 milliseconds. Plus, first impressions are

persistent. It’s very hard to shake that first impression you create with a

customer.

A visually appealing design primes the user for good expectations even

before they start using your product. Once that first impression is created,

the user leans toward viewing the entire product through a positive lens.

It’s important to have a consistent visual experience as well. Good design

has to extend right from your website to your entire product in order to

maintain that positive impression.

With all this in mind, and after much experimentation, we carefully put

together the above visual design for Zoho Inventory. Now, since visual

design is a creative process there’s no definite set of steps to designing

something that looks good. However, we decided to use basic visual design

principles as guidelines to structure our process.

Here are the things we took into account:

TYPOGRAPHY: Readability of UI elements is one of the basic things that you

need to ensure. We have been using the Proxima Nova font so far in many

of our products. We carried this over to Zoho Inventory and it worked out

beautifully.

COLOR SCHEME: Choosing the right color scheme is like dressing up really

well. When people have nothing else to go on, they will immediately judge

you based on what you’re wearing. If you want that kind of judgement in

your favor when people look at and use your product, it’s important to

choose a color scheme that is visually appealing.

While for many of our products (such as Zoho Books), we went for a

pastel-style color scheme, we did something different with Zoho Inventory,

going for a dark and flat color scheme that mixed elements of black and

blue. This gave it a clean, professional look.

ICONS: Icons play a role of giving important visual information which text by

itself cannot achieve. We needed to choose icons that were not only

meaningful, but complemented the rest of the design choices.

We had a debate in our design team about whether to choose hollow icons

or solid icons. We ended up choosing a set of hollow icons which we

concluded were better for representing real-world objects such as items and

packages (which inventory managers have to deal with everyday) than solid

icons were.

VISUAL HIERARCHY: While the layout, hierarchy and grouping of different

elements were decided in the wireframing process, we needed to visually

distinguish these elements in the visual design stage so that the user could

know where to find what. Plus, we needed to make the most important

elements stand out, so that they were more visually accessible.

For example, the aforementioned informational complexity in each sales

order had to be handled carefully by visually distinguishing each and every

element. This involved subtle changes in color, font and style so that

elements were distinct and separate and did not blend with each other.

We recently launched Zoho Inventory, our inventory and order management

solution.

We're definitely learning a lot as we expand our suite of products. Our goal is to

not only ensure that each product is fantastic to use, but also to make the

experience consistent across products. This is important because our products

are designed from the ground up to work together and to be used with each

other.

Let's see how we accomplished this for https://www.zoho.com/inventory/.

A unified, consistent experience across products.

In my previous article about how we redesigned https://www.zoho.com/books/,

our online accounting solution, I talked about how we improved the overall UX

through lots of experimentation and learning.

Zoho Inventory, on first glance, looks a lot like Zoho Books. That’s because we

designed it that way. We used the same basic design skeleton and built upwards

from there. This design style persists across many of our products: Zoho Invoice: https://www.zoho.com/invoice/

Zoho Books: https://www.zoho.com/books/

Zoho Subscriptions: https://www.zoho.com/subscriptions/

And Zoho Expense: https://www.zoho.com/expense/

This uniform design provides a level of UX and visual consistency across products

that you simply will not find when you integrate independent solutions from

different providers.

a) Identifying the key design challenge.

The very first thing we needed to do was to ask the key question: What problems

are we trying to solve? Problem-oriented thinking provides structure to the

entire design process. Once you start thinking in terms of problems, the specific

solutions will automatically follow.

For Zoho Inventory, the entire inventory and order management process is

centered around managing sales orders and purchase orders. There’s a lot of

complexity here. For example, sales orders contain a lot of information. Imagine

you order some items from a marketplace like Amazon. If you’re ordering a lot of

items, the seller can’t ship all of them at the same time. Depending on various

factors, like the size limit of the package and the availability of different items,

some boxes may be shipped at different times.

The seller needs to keep track of which of those items have been invoiced, which

have been paid for, and which have been shipped. Multiple items are often placed

into a single package, while there are also orders with multiple packages for

different sets of items. All of these things need to be tracked.

Before we started designing the UX to solve these problems, we first needed

deeper insights into how business owners and inventory managers approached

these problems in the real world.

b) Stepping into the shoes of the user.

You can’t build a great car without knowing how to drive.

Similarly, you can’t build a great user experience without knowing exactly what

users want.

You need to get all that background information long before you start putting pen

to paper (or cursor to screen). Only then will you be actually designing something

that’s nice to use and allows the user to get things done as quickly as possible.

Luckily, we had all the background information we needed before we started

designing the interface for Zoho Inventory. We’ve been running Zoho Books and

Zoho CRM for many years, and we’ve had numerous requests for an inventory

management solution that ties right into these products.

Here’s just one example of a customer asking for an inventory management

solution on our forums over 4 years ago. We’ve gotten hundreds of such requests

over the years.

A customer requesting a product to manage their inventory.

These requests provided a treasure trove of information. We got a peek directly

into hundreds of real-world scenarios and problems that needed solving by a

dedicated inventory management solution. All this experience meant that we had

a very good idea of what kind of software that our users would like before we

even started the design process.

Plus, months before we released Zoho Inventory, we opened up an early-access

version of the product for over 700 users.

The feedback was golden.

We’d never have gotten these insights by working on the UX using only internal

feedback from design and management. You need user feedback to design a

great user experience.

It is easier to talk than to listen. Pay attention to your clients, your users, your readers, and your friends. Your design will get better as you listen to other people.— ELLEN LUPTON

c) Getting some structure: Designing the Information Architecture and wireframing.

We’ve seen that inventory managers need to handle a high level of informational

complexity when it comes to managing orders. There’s lots to track and manage

to make sure everything is going smoothly.

The goal with designing the interface was to empower the user to handle all this

information and take action on it quickly.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.

— TOM & DAVID KELLEY

This process starts with designing an information architecture — this is basically a

representation of all information that needs to be tracked by the user, and

how it should be organized hierarchically.

For order management, this is the basic information that the user has to

track:

Items: Number of items, quantity

Packages: Number of packages, items in the packages,

status of package: packed, shipped or delivered

Invoices: Number of invoices, packages/items in the invoices,

status of invoice: sent, fully paid, partially paid, overdue

It’s pretty simple, but this is the essence of the information architecture,

and it’s a good illustration of the complexity and the infinite number of use

cases that the user will have to handle.

For example, a sales order can have ten different items, and these items

are packaged into three different packages (taking weight into account) and

one invoice is issued for one package while another invoice is issued for the

other two packages. And there will be lots of different sales orders with

very different configurations. The final interface should allow the user to

handle and take action on all of this information.

Putting together a complete wireframe was important because there can be

a lot of things to think about, a lot of individual use cases to solve for. A

wireframe puts a structure to all the fragmented problems and thought

processes running through the designer’s head.

With the information architecture in place, we put together a wireframe

that allowed easy access to all relevant information in a sales order, and

any action you need to take can be done right from within the above

interface.

Wireframe for the Zoho Inventory order management screen.

d) Nailing the visual design.

Visual design is exceedingly important to a product’s success. Why? First

impressions matter. Studies have shown that users form opinions based on

visual design in less than 50 milliseconds. Plus, first impressions are

persistent. It’s very hard to shake that first impression you create with a

customer.

A visually appealing design primes the user for good expectations even

before they start using your product. Once that first impression is created,

the user leans toward viewing the entire product through a positive lens.

It’s important to have a consistent visual experience as well. Good design

has to extend right from your website to your entire product in order to

maintain that positive impression.

With all this in mind, and after much experimentation, we carefully put

together the above visual design for Zoho Inventory. Now, since visual

design is a creative process there’s no definite set of steps to designing

something that looks good. However, we decided to use basic visual design

principles as guidelines to structure our process.

Here are the things we took into account:

TYPOGRAPHY: Readability of UI elements is one of the basic things that you

need to ensure. We have been using the Proxima Nova font so far in many

of our products. We carried this over to Zoho Inventory and it worked out

beautifully.

COLOR SCHEME: Choosing the right color scheme is like dressing up really

well. When people have nothing else to go on, they will immediately judge

you based on what you’re wearing. If you want that kind of judgement in

your favor when people look at and use your product, it’s important to

choose a color scheme that is visually appealing.

While for many of our products (such as Zoho Books), we went for a

pastel-style color scheme, we did something different with Zoho Inventory,

going for a dark and flat color scheme that mixed elements of black and

blue. This gave it a clean, professional look.

ICONS: Icons play a role of giving important visual information which text by

itself cannot achieve. We needed to choose icons that were not only

meaningful, but complemented the rest of the design choices.

We had a debate in our design team about whether to choose hollow icons

or solid icons. We ended up choosing a set of hollow icons which we

concluded were better for representing real-world objects such as items and

packages (which inventory managers have to deal with everyday) than solid

icons were.

VISUAL HIERARCHY: While the layout, hierarchy and grouping of different

elements were decided in the wireframing process, we needed to visually

distinguish these elements in the visual design stage so that the user could

know where to find what. Plus, we needed to make the most important

elements stand out, so that they were more visually accessible.

For example, the aforementioned informational complexity in each sales

order had to be handled carefully by visually distinguishing each and every

element. This involved subtle changes in color, font and style so that

elements were distinct and separate and did not blend with each other.

We recently launched Zoho Inventory, our inventory and order management

solution.

We're definitely learning a lot as we expand our suite of products. Our goal is to

not only ensure that each product is fantastic to use, but also to make the

experience consistent across products. This is important because our products

are designed from the ground up to work together and to be used with each

other.

Let's see how we accomplished this for https://www.zoho.com/inventory/.

A unified, consistent experience across products.

In my previous article about how we redesigned https://www.zoho.com/books/,

our online accounting solution, I talked about how we improved the overall UX

through lots of experimentation and learning.

Zoho Inventory, on first glance, looks a lot like Zoho Books. That’s because we

designed it that way. We used the same basic design skeleton and built upwards

from there. This design style persists across many of our products: Zoho Invoice: https://www.zoho.com/invoice/

Zoho Books: https://www.zoho.com/books/

Zoho Subscriptions: https://www.zoho.com/subscriptions/

And Zoho Expense: https://www.zoho.com/expense/

This uniform design provides a level of UX and visual consistency across products

that you simply will not find when you integrate independent solutions from

different providers.

a) Identifying the key design challenge.

The very first thing we needed to do was to ask the key question: What problems

are we trying to solve? Problem-oriented thinking provides structure to the

entire design process. Once you start thinking in terms of problems, the specific

solutions will automatically follow.

For Zoho Inventory, the entire inventory and order management process is

centered around managing sales orders and purchase orders. There’s a lot of

complexity here. For example, sales orders contain a lot of information. Imagine

you order some items from a marketplace like Amazon. If you’re ordering a lot of

items, the seller can’t ship all of them at the same time. Depending on various

factors, like the size limit of the package and the availability of different items,

some boxes may be shipped at different times.

The seller needs to keep track of which of those items have been invoiced, which

have been paid for, and which have been shipped. Multiple items are often placed

into a single package, while there are also orders with multiple packages for

different sets of items. All of these things need to be tracked.

Before we started designing the UX to solve these problems, we first needed

deeper insights into how business owners and inventory managers approached

these problems in the real world.

b) Stepping into the shoes of the user.

You can’t build a great car without knowing how to drive.

Similarly, you can’t build a great user experience without knowing exactly what

users want.

You need to get all that background information long before you start putting pen

to paper (or cursor to screen). Only then will you be actually designing something

that’s nice to use and allows the user to get things done as quickly as possible.

Luckily, we had all the background information we needed before we started

designing the interface for Zoho Inventory. We’ve been running Zoho Books and

Zoho CRM for many years, and we’ve had numerous requests for an inventory

management solution that ties right into these products.

Here’s just one example of a customer asking for an inventory management

solution on our forums over 4 years ago. We’ve gotten hundreds of such requests

over the years.

A customer requesting a product to manage their inventory.

These requests provided a treasure trove of information. We got a peek directly

into hundreds of real-world scenarios and problems that needed solving by a

dedicated inventory management solution. All this experience meant that we had

a very good idea of what kind of software that our users would like before we

even started the design process.

Plus, months before we released Zoho Inventory, we opened up an early-access

version of the product for over 700 users.

The feedback was golden.

We’d never have gotten these insights by working on the UX using only internal

feedback from design and management. You need user feedback to design a

great user experience.

It is easier to talk than to listen. Pay attention to your clients, your users, your readers, and your friends. Your design will get better as you listen to other people.— ELLEN LUPTON

c) Getting some structure: Designing the Information Architecture and wireframing.

We’ve seen that inventory managers need to handle a high level of informational

complexity when it comes to managing orders. There’s lots to track and manage

to make sure everything is going smoothly.

The goal with designing the interface was to empower the user to handle all this

information and take action on it quickly.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.

— TOM & DAVID KELLEY

This process starts with designing an information architecture — this is basically a

representation of all information that needs to be tracked by the user, and

how it should be organized hierarchically.

For order management, this is the basic information that the user has to

track:

Items: Number of items, quantity

Packages: Number of packages, items in the packages,

status of package: packed, shipped or delivered

Invoices: Number of invoices, packages/items in the invoices,

status of invoice: sent, fully paid, partially paid, overdue

It’s pretty simple, but this is the essence of the information architecture,

and it’s a good illustration of the complexity and the infinite number of use

cases that the user will have to handle.

For example, a sales order can have ten different items, and these items

are packaged into three different packages (taking weight into account) and

one invoice is issued for one package while another invoice is issued for the

other two packages. And there will be lots of different sales orders with

very different configurations. The final interface should allow the user to

handle and take action on all of this information.

Putting together a complete wireframe was important because there can be

a lot of things to think about, a lot of individual use cases to solve for. A

wireframe puts a structure to all the fragmented problems and thought

processes running through the designer’s head.

With the information architecture in place, we put together a wireframe

that allowed easy access to all relevant information in a sales order, and

any action you need to take can be done right from within the above

interface.

Wireframe for the Zoho Inventory order management screen.

d) Nailing the visual design.

Visual design is exceedingly important to a product’s success. Why? First

impressions matter. Studies have shown that users form opinions based on

visual design in less than 50 milliseconds. Plus, first impressions are

persistent. It’s very hard to shake that first impression you create with a

customer.

A visually appealing design primes the user for good expectations even

before they start using your product. Once that first impression is created,

the user leans toward viewing the entire product through a positive lens.

It’s important to have a consistent visual experience as well. Good design

has to extend right from your website to your entire product in order to

maintain that positive impression.

With all this in mind, and after much experimentation, we carefully put

together the above visual design for Zoho Inventory. Now, since visual

design is a creative process there’s no definite set of steps to designing

something that looks good. However, we decided to use basic visual design

principles as guidelines to structure our process.

Here are the things we took into account:

TYPOGRAPHY: Readability of UI elements is one of the basic things that you

need to ensure. We have been using the Proxima Nova font so far in many

of our products. We carried this over to Zoho Inventory and it worked out

beautifully.

COLOR SCHEME: Choosing the right color scheme is like dressing up really

well. When people have nothing else to go on, they will immediately judge

you based on what you’re wearing. If you want that kind of judgement in

your favor when people look at and use your product, it’s important to

choose a color scheme that is visually appealing.

While for many of our products (such as Zoho Books), we went for a

pastel-style color scheme, we did something different with Zoho Inventory,

going for a dark and flat color scheme that mixed elements of black and

blue. This gave it a clean, professional look.

ICONS: Icons play a role of giving important visual information which text by

itself cannot achieve. We needed to choose icons that were not only

meaningful, but complemented the rest of the design choices.

We had a debate in our design team about whether to choose hollow icons

or solid icons. We ended up choosing a set of hollow icons which we

concluded were better for representing real-world objects such as items and

packages (which inventory managers have to deal with everyday) than solid

icons were.

VISUAL HIERARCHY: While the layout, hierarchy and grouping of different

elements were decided in the wireframing process, we needed to visually

distinguish these elements in the visual design stage so that the user could

know where to find what. Plus, we needed to make the most important

elements stand out, so that they were more visually accessible.

For example, the aforementioned informational complexity in each sales

order had to be handled carefully by visually distinguishing each and every

element. This involved subtle changes in color, font and style so that

elements were distinct and separate and did not blend with each other.

The final Visual Design for Zoho Inventory. To view live interface at https://www.zoho.com/inventory/

We recently launched Zoho Inventory, our inventory and order management

solution.

We're definitely learning a lot as we expand our suite of products. Our goal is to

not only ensure that each product is fantastic to use, but also to make the

experience consistent across products. This is important because our products

are designed from the ground up to work together and to be used with each

other.

Let's see how we accomplished this for https://www.zoho.com/inventory/.

A unified, consistent experience across products.

In my previous article about how we redesigned https://www.zoho.com/books/,

our online accounting solution, I talked about how we improved the overall UX

through lots of experimentation and learning.

Zoho Inventory, on first glance, looks a lot like Zoho Books. That’s because we

designed it that way. We used the same basic design skeleton and built upwards

from there. This design style persists across many of our products: Zoho Invoice: https://www.zoho.com/invoice/

Zoho Books: https://www.zoho.com/books/

Zoho Subscriptions: https://www.zoho.com/subscriptions/

And Zoho Expense: https://www.zoho.com/expense/

This uniform design provides a level of UX and visual consistency across products

that you simply will not find when you integrate independent solutions from

different providers.

a) Identifying the key design challenge.

The very first thing we needed to do was to ask the key question: What problems

are we trying to solve? Problem-oriented thinking provides structure to the

entire design process. Once you start thinking in terms of problems, the specific

solutions will automatically follow.

For Zoho Inventory, the entire inventory and order management process is

centered around managing sales orders and purchase orders. There’s a lot of

complexity here. For example, sales orders contain a lot of information. Imagine

you order some items from a marketplace like Amazon. If you’re ordering a lot of

items, the seller can’t ship all of them at the same time. Depending on various

factors, like the size limit of the package and the availability of different items,

some boxes may be shipped at different times.

The seller needs to keep track of which of those items have been invoiced, which

have been paid for, and which have been shipped. Multiple items are often placed

into a single package, while there are also orders with multiple packages for

different sets of items. All of these things need to be tracked.

Before we started designing the UX to solve these problems, we first needed

deeper insights into how business owners and inventory managers approached

these problems in the real world.

b) Stepping into the shoes of the user.

You can’t build a great car without knowing how to drive.

Similarly, you can’t build a great user experience without knowing exactly what

users want.

You need to get all that background information long before you start putting pen

to paper (or cursor to screen). Only then will you be actually designing something

that’s nice to use and allows the user to get things done as quickly as possible.

Luckily, we had all the background information we needed before we started

designing the interface for Zoho Inventory. We’ve been running Zoho Books and

Zoho CRM for many years, and we’ve had numerous requests for an inventory

management solution that ties right into these products.

Here’s just one example of a customer asking for an inventory management

solution on our forums over 4 years ago. We’ve gotten hundreds of such requests

over the years.

A customer requesting a product to manage their inventory.

These requests provided a treasure trove of information. We got a peek directly

into hundreds of real-world scenarios and problems that needed solving by a

dedicated inventory management solution. All this experience meant that we had

a very good idea of what kind of software that our users would like before we

even started the design process.

Plus, months before we released Zoho Inventory, we opened up an early-access

version of the product for over 700 users.

The feedback was golden.

We’d never have gotten these insights by working on the UX using only internal

feedback from design and management. You need user feedback to design a

great user experience.

It is easier to talk than to listen. Pay attention to your clients, your users, your readers, and your friends. Your design will get better as you listen to other people.— ELLEN LUPTON

c) Getting some structure: Designing the Information Architecture and wireframing.

We’ve seen that inventory managers need to handle a high level of informational

complexity when it comes to managing orders. There’s lots to track and manage

to make sure everything is going smoothly.

The goal with designing the interface was to empower the user to handle all this

information and take action on it quickly.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.

— TOM & DAVID KELLEY

This process starts with designing an information architecture — this is basically a

representation of all information that needs to be tracked by the user, and

how it should be organized hierarchically.

For order management, this is the basic information that the user has to

track:

Items: Number of items, quantity

Packages: Number of packages, items in the packages,

status of package: packed, shipped or delivered

Invoices: Number of invoices, packages/items in the invoices,

status of invoice: sent, fully paid, partially paid, overdue

It’s pretty simple, but this is the essence of the information architecture,

and it’s a good illustration of the complexity and the infinite number of use

cases that the user will have to handle.

For example, a sales order can have ten different items, and these items

are packaged into three different packages (taking weight into account) and

one invoice is issued for one package while another invoice is issued for the

other two packages. And there will be lots of different sales orders with

very different configurations. The final interface should allow the user to

handle and take action on all of this information.

Putting together a complete wireframe was important because there can be

a lot of things to think about, a lot of individual use cases to solve for. A

wireframe puts a structure to all the fragmented problems and thought

processes running through the designer’s head.

With the information architecture in place, we put together a wireframe

that allowed easy access to all relevant information in a sales order, and

any action you need to take can be done right from within the above

interface.

Wireframe for the Zoho Inventory order management screen.

d) Nailing the visual design.

Visual design is exceedingly important to a product’s success. Why? First

impressions matter. Studies have shown that users form opinions based on

visual design in less than 50 milliseconds. Plus, first impressions are

persistent. It’s very hard to shake that first impression you create with a

customer.

A visually appealing design primes the user for good expectations even

before they start using your product. Once that first impression is created,

the user leans toward viewing the entire product through a positive lens.

It’s important to have a consistent visual experience as well. Good design

has to extend right from your website to your entire product in order to

maintain that positive impression.

With all this in mind, and after much experimentation, we carefully put

together the above visual design for Zoho Inventory. Now, since visual

design is a creative process there’s no definite set of steps to designing

something that looks good. However, we decided to use basic visual design

principles as guidelines to structure our process.

Here are the things we took into account:

TYPOGRAPHY: Readability of UI elements is one of the basic things that you

need to ensure. We have been using the Proxima Nova font so far in many

of our products. We carried this over to Zoho Inventory and it worked out

beautifully.

COLOR SCHEME: Choosing the right color scheme is like dressing up really

well. When people have nothing else to go on, they will immediately judge

you based on what you’re wearing. If you want that kind of judgement in

your favor when people look at and use your product, it’s important to

choose a color scheme that is visually appealing.

While for many of our products (such as Zoho Books), we went for a

pastel-style color scheme, we did something different with Zoho Inventory,

going for a dark and flat color scheme that mixed elements of black and

blue. This gave it a clean, professional look.

ICONS: Icons play a role of giving important visual information which text by

itself cannot achieve. We needed to choose icons that were not only

meaningful, but complemented the rest of the design choices.

We had a debate in our design team about whether to choose hollow icons

or solid icons. We ended up choosing a set of hollow icons which we

concluded were better for representing real-world objects such as items and

packages (which inventory managers have to deal with everyday) than solid

icons were.

VISUAL HIERARCHY: While the layout, hierarchy and grouping of different

elements were decided in the wireframing process, we needed to visually

distinguish these elements in the visual design stage so that the user could

know where to find what. Plus, we needed to make the most important

elements stand out, so that they were more visually accessible.

For example, the aforementioned informational complexity in each sales

order had to be handled carefully by visually distinguishing each and every

element. This involved subtle changes in color, font and style so that

elements were distinct and separate and did not blend with each other.

We recently launched Zoho Inventory, our inventory and order management

solution.

We're definitely learning a lot as we expand our suite of products. Our goal is to

not only ensure that each product is fantastic to use, but also to make the

experience consistent across products. This is important because our products

are designed from the ground up to work together and to be used with each

other.

Let's see how we accomplished this for https://www.zoho.com/inventory/.

A unified, consistent experience across products.

In my previous article about how we redesigned https://www.zoho.com/books/,

our online accounting solution, I talked about how we improved the overall UX

through lots of experimentation and learning.

Zoho Inventory, on first glance, looks a lot like Zoho Books. That’s because we

designed it that way. We used the same basic design skeleton and built upwards

from there. This design style persists across many of our products: Zoho Invoice: https://www.zoho.com/invoice/

Zoho Books: https://www.zoho.com/books/

Zoho Subscriptions: https://www.zoho.com/subscriptions/

And Zoho Expense: https://www.zoho.com/expense/

This uniform design provides a level of UX and visual consistency across products

that you simply will not find when you integrate independent solutions from

different providers.

a) Identifying the key design challenge.

The very first thing we needed to do was to ask the key question: What problems

are we trying to solve? Problem-oriented thinking provides structure to the

entire design process. Once you start thinking in terms of problems, the specific

solutions will automatically follow.

For Zoho Inventory, the entire inventory and order management process is

centered around managing sales orders and purchase orders. There’s a lot of

complexity here. For example, sales orders contain a lot of information. Imagine

you order some items from a marketplace like Amazon. If you’re ordering a lot of

items, the seller can’t ship all of them at the same time. Depending on various

factors, like the size limit of the package and the availability of different items,

some boxes may be shipped at different times.

The seller needs to keep track of which of those items have been invoiced, which

have been paid for, and which have been shipped. Multiple items are often placed

into a single package, while there are also orders with multiple packages for

different sets of items. All of these things need to be tracked.

Before we started designing the UX to solve these problems, we first needed

deeper insights into how business owners and inventory managers approached

these problems in the real world.

b) Stepping into the shoes of the user.

You can’t build a great car without knowing how to drive.

Similarly, you can’t build a great user experience without knowing exactly what

users want.

You need to get all that background information long before you start putting pen

to paper (or cursor to screen). Only then will you be actually designing something

that’s nice to use and allows the user to get things done as quickly as possible.

Luckily, we had all the background information we needed before we started

designing the interface for Zoho Inventory. We’ve been running Zoho Books and

Zoho CRM for many years, and we’ve had numerous requests for an inventory

management solution that ties right into these products.

Here’s just one example of a customer asking for an inventory management

solution on our forums over 4 years ago. We’ve gotten hundreds of such requests

over the years.

A customer requesting a product to manage their inventory.

These requests provided a treasure trove of information. We got a peek directly

into hundreds of real-world scenarios and problems that needed solving by a

dedicated inventory management solution. All this experience meant that we had

a very good idea of what kind of software that our users would like before we

even started the design process.

Plus, months before we released Zoho Inventory, we opened up an early-access

version of the product for over 700 users.

The feedback was golden.

We’d never have gotten these insights by working on the UX using only internal

feedback from design and management. You need user feedback to design a

great user experience.

It is easier to talk than to listen. Pay attention to your clients, your users, your readers, and your friends. Your design will get better as you listen to other people.— ELLEN LUPTON

c) Getting some structure: Designing the Information Architecture and wireframing.

We’ve seen that inventory managers need to handle a high level of informational

complexity when it comes to managing orders. There’s lots to track and manage

to make sure everything is going smoothly.

The goal with designing the interface was to empower the user to handle all this

information and take action on it quickly.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.

— TOM & DAVID KELLEY

This process starts with designing an information architecture — this is basically a

representation of all information that needs to be tracked by the user, and

how it should be organized hierarchically.

For order management, this is the basic information that the user has to

track:

Items: Number of items, quantity

Packages: Number of packages, items in the packages,

status of package: packed, shipped or delivered

Invoices: Number of invoices, packages/items in the invoices,

status of invoice: sent, fully paid, partially paid, overdue

It’s pretty simple, but this is the essence of the information architecture,

and it’s a good illustration of the complexity and the infinite number of use

cases that the user will have to handle.

For example, a sales order can have ten different items, and these items

are packaged into three different packages (taking weight into account) and

one invoice is issued for one package while another invoice is issued for the

other two packages. And there will be lots of different sales orders with

very different configurations. The final interface should allow the user to

handle and take action on all of this information.

Putting together a complete wireframe was important because there can be

a lot of things to think about, a lot of individual use cases to solve for. A

wireframe puts a structure to all the fragmented problems and thought

processes running through the designer’s head.

With the information architecture in place, we put together a wireframe

that allowed easy access to all relevant information in a sales order, and

any action you need to take can be done right from within the above

interface.

Wireframe for the Zoho Inventory order management screen.

d) Nailing the visual design.

Visual design is exceedingly important to a product’s success. Why? First

impressions matter. Studies have shown that users form opinions based on

visual design in less than 50 milliseconds. Plus, first impressions are

persistent. It’s very hard to shake that first impression you create with a

customer.

A visually appealing design primes the user for good expectations even

before they start using your product. Once that first impression is created,

the user leans toward viewing the entire product through a positive lens.

It’s important to have a consistent visual experience as well. Good design

has to extend right from your website to your entire product in order to

maintain that positive impression.

With all this in mind, and after much experimentation, we carefully put

together the above visual design for Zoho Inventory. Now, since visual

design is a creative process there’s no definite set of steps to designing

something that looks good. However, we decided to use basic visual design

principles as guidelines to structure our process.

Here are the things we took into account:

TYPOGRAPHY: Readability of UI elements is one of the basic things that you

need to ensure. We have been using the Proxima Nova font so far in many

of our products. We carried this over to Zoho Inventory and it worked out

beautifully.

COLOR SCHEME: Choosing the right color scheme is like dressing up really

well. When people have nothing else to go on, they will immediately judge

you based on what you’re wearing. If you want that kind of judgement in

your favor when people look at and use your product, it’s important to

choose a color scheme that is visually appealing.

While for many of our products (such as Zoho Books), we went for a

pastel-style color scheme, we did something different with Zoho Inventory,

going for a dark and flat color scheme that mixed elements of black and

blue. This gave it a clean, professional look.

ICONS: Icons play a role of giving important visual information which text by

itself cannot achieve. We needed to choose icons that were not only

meaningful, but complemented the rest of the design choices.

We had a debate in our design team about whether to choose hollow icons

or solid icons. We ended up choosing a set of hollow icons which we

concluded were better for representing real-world objects such as items and

packages (which inventory managers have to deal with everyday) than solid

icons were.

VISUAL HIERARCHY: While the layout, hierarchy and grouping of different

elements were decided in the wireframing process, we needed to visually

distinguish these elements in the visual design stage so that the user could

know where to find what. Plus, we needed to make the most important

elements stand out, so that they were more visually accessible.

For example, the aforementioned informational complexity in each sales

order had to be handled carefully by visually distinguishing each and every

element. This involved subtle changes in color, font and style so that

elements were distinct and separate and did not blend with each other.

Hand-holding users throughevery new features

Inventory management software is complex. But we wanted to make it so

easy to use, the user should be able to start using it and get things done

even if woken up in the middle of the night.

That means hand-holding the user through each and every feature, provid-

ing relevant information right when he needs it.

We needed to deliver information to the user at the right time so that he

can do what needs to be done, like the markers on the road that tell you the

right direction to your destination.

It’s about catching customers in the act, and providing highly relevant and

highly contextual information.

— PAUL MARITZ

This information has to be delivered to the user in some way. Help docu-

mentation is one way to achieve information delivery. And good support, of

course, is essential for the user to get the information he needs.

But there’s a detour involved there. The user has to move away from the

app to get information. These things take time and a lot of tab-switching and talking and emailing.

But what if there was no detour? What if you provided the user with all the

information he needs exactly when he needs it? To do this, we decided to include relevant information inside the user interface.

For example, the user needs help when he needs to integrate Zoho

Inventory with another service. Zoho Inventory has a lot of integrations.

While experienced users will know how to make these integrations work, a

lot of users won’t know what is possible with these integrations. That’s why

once you land on an integration page we provide a brief summary of what

the integration can do.

For example, consider marketplaces. With Zoho Inventory, you can integrate

with eBay, Amazon, Etsy, and Shopify. There is a business advantage to

selling your products on as many marketplaces as possible, but a lot of

businesses don’t diversify the marketplaces on which they sell their products.

This is partly because of the different nuances (and difficulty) involved with

each marketplace integration.

Right within Zoho Inventory, we have prominent instructions on how to

integrate with each marketplace and how exactly each integration will behave.

We articulate how data items (such as product and order information) in Zoho

Inventory will be labeled in the marketplace and vice versa. This gives

customers all the knowledge required to integrate these marketplaces with

Zoho Inventory.

We’re providing instructions. And while that’s nothing really new, contextually

providing this information in an easily digestible manner right within the user

interface is new. We are removing all emotional (and knowledge) barriers to

getting integrations done.

Conclusion

Inventory management is complex. It can be hard work. I think we successfully

distilled that complexity into something that is really simple to use, and made

some lives easier in the process. At the risk of sounding a little boastful, we

think that’s pretty awesome.

I hope you took something away from this post. Tell us what you think by

leaving a comment below. And if you liked it, don’t forget to share it with your

friends & other network!

Originally published at

https://www.zoho.com/inventory/blog/zoho-inventory-ui-ux-design-process.html

Inventory management software is complex. But we wanted to make it so

easy to use, the user should be able to start using it and get things done

even if woken up in the middle of the night.

That means hand-holding the user through each and every feature, provid-

ing relevant information right when he needs it.

We needed to deliver information to the user at the right time so that he

can do what needs to be done, like the markers on the road that tell you the

right direction to your destination.

It’s about catching customers in the act, and providing highly relevant and

highly contextual information.

— PAUL MARITZ

This information has to be delivered to the user in some way. Help docu-

mentation is one way to achieve information delivery. And good support, of

course, is essential for the user to get the information he needs.

But there’s a detour involved there. The user has to move away from the

app to get information. These things take time and a lot of tab-switching and talking and emailing.

But what if there was no detour? What if you provided the user with all the

information he needs exactly when he needs it? To do this, we decided to include relevant information inside the user interface.

For example, the user needs help when he needs to integrate Zoho

Inventory with another service. Zoho Inventory has a lot of integrations.

While experienced users will know how to make these integrations work, a

lot of users won’t know what is possible with these integrations. That’s why

once you land on an integration page we provide a brief summary of what

the integration can do.

For example, consider marketplaces. With Zoho Inventory, you can integrate

with eBay, Amazon, Etsy, and Shopify. There is a business advantage to

selling your products on as many marketplaces as possible, but a lot of

businesses don’t diversify the marketplaces on which they sell their products.

This is partly because of the different nuances (and difficulty) involved with

each marketplace integration.

Right within Zoho Inventory, we have prominent instructions on how to

integrate with each marketplace and how exactly each integration will behave.

We articulate how data items (such as product and order information) in Zoho

Inventory will be labeled in the marketplace and vice versa. This gives

customers all the knowledge required to integrate these marketplaces with

Zoho Inventory.

We’re providing instructions. And while that’s nothing really new, contextually

providing this information in an easily digestible manner right within the user

interface is new. We are removing all emotional (and knowledge) barriers to

getting integrations done.

Conclusion

Inventory management is complex. It can be hard work. I think we successfully

distilled that complexity into something that is really simple to use, and made

some lives easier in the process. At the risk of sounding a little boastful, we

think that’s pretty awesome.

I hope you took something away from this post. Tell us what you think by

leaving a comment below. And if you liked it, don’t forget to share it with your

friends & other network!

Originally published at

https://www.zoho.com/inventory/blog/zoho-inventory-ui-ux-design-process.html

Contextual help for setting up a marketplace integration. Visit at https://www.zoho.com/inventory/

Inventory management software is complex. But we wanted to make it so

easy to use, the user should be able to start using it and get things done

even if woken up in the middle of the night.

That means hand-holding the user through each and every feature, provid-

ing relevant information right when he needs it.

We needed to deliver information to the user at the right time so that he

can do what needs to be done, like the markers on the road that tell you the

right direction to your destination.

It’s about catching customers in the act, and providing highly relevant and

highly contextual information.

— PAUL MARITZ

This information has to be delivered to the user in some way. Help docu-

mentation is one way to achieve information delivery. And good support, of

course, is essential for the user to get the information he needs.

But there’s a detour involved there. The user has to move away from the

app to get information. These things take time and a lot of tab-switching and talking and emailing.

But what if there was no detour? What if you provided the user with all the

information he needs exactly when he needs it? To do this, we decided to include relevant information inside the user interface.

For example, the user needs help when he needs to integrate Zoho

Inventory with another service. Zoho Inventory has a lot of integrations.

While experienced users will know how to make these integrations work, a

lot of users won’t know what is possible with these integrations. That’s why

once you land on an integration page we provide a brief summary of what

the integration can do.

For example, consider marketplaces. With Zoho Inventory, you can integrate

with eBay, Amazon, Etsy, and Shopify. There is a business advantage to

selling your products on as many marketplaces as possible, but a lot of

businesses don’t diversify the marketplaces on which they sell their products.

This is partly because of the different nuances (and difficulty) involved with

each marketplace integration.

Right within Zoho Inventory, we have prominent instructions on how to

integrate with each marketplace and how exactly each integration will behave.

We articulate how data items (such as product and order information) in Zoho

Inventory will be labeled in the marketplace and vice versa. This gives

customers all the knowledge required to integrate these marketplaces with

Zoho Inventory.

We’re providing instructions. And while that’s nothing really new, contextually

providing this information in an easily digestible manner right within the user

interface is new. We are removing all emotional (and knowledge) barriers to

getting integrations done.

Conclusion

Inventory management is complex. It can be hard work. I think we successfully

distilled that complexity into something that is really simple to use, and made

some lives easier in the process. At the risk of sounding a little boastful, we

think that’s pretty awesome.

I hope you took something away from this post. Tell us what you think by

leaving a comment below. And if you liked it, don’t forget to share it with your

friends & other network!

Originally published at

https://www.zoho.com/inventory/blog/zoho-inventory-ui-ux-design-process.html