Following an acquisition, I was offered the opportunity to relocate to Canada to help steer the Android product team in a new direction, prioritising initiatives and working to define problems more in line with our new product method. As part of this goal, I interfaced with several product teams and worked to improve existing workflows across all platforms and teams (web and iOS) using our unified design system, Helios. This decreased inconsistencies between platforms and decreased delivery time for the Android team.
The Android Register was a relatively new app, so we wanted to prioritise features that would most benefit merchants and drive new sales. We know that 96% of our merchants have the Store Credit feature active, 48% of those merchants issue and redeem store credit, and 91% of participating merchants view their store credit reports. This feature was critical to build.
Based on our iOS-using merchants, we knew most Android adopters would also use our web platform. In order to promote ease-of-use, we needed to ensure consistency across all three platforms, a major unmet challenge.
Like web and iOS, Store Credit on Android must allow for merchants to issue and track credit and for customers to redeem store credit. After analysing the current workflow, I concluded that it was intuitive but that the layout of information could be improved. I drew upon our design principles to create a new layout that is clear, consistent, friendly and bold.
When designing, I found that Android did not have many comparable components frequently used on our web and iOS platforms, which created inconsistencies and increased the cognitive load of our users. So, I began to systematically catalog inconsistencies across our three platforms to facilitate the development of a unified component design library system.
Below is an example of disabled states across the platforms and how the implementation is different. Upon starting conversations about this specific implementation, we learned the disabled effect applied to other components that have a disabled state (e.g. inputs, text, key-lines, etc). So understanding the why of a solution helped us understand what our options are when making platform implementation consistent (do we need to update our design system? or will Android have a one-off implementation due to its constraints?), and working with engineers to ensure the solution is a feasible one.
I found several UI inconsistencies, which would disadvantage our cross-platform users, more than 30% of merchants.
Some inaccuracies between platforms: