Pioner Labs

Designing a Product Information Management System for an Enterprise in 6 weeks

Expertise

UX & UI Design, Development

Platforms

Web

Industry

Apparel

Together with Pioner Labs we built a platform for managing product information across many sales channels for one of Europe’s leading apparel companies with 1500 retail stores across the continent.

The challenge

The EL Passion team's task was to look into how client’s product information is managed, what the issues with online merchandising are, and the type of product information managers encounter daily.

We were asked by the client to observe and analyze their processes in order to provide an external perspective on how a Product Information Management (PIM) tool should be constructed.

The UX Discovery phase & a workshop

Our team started the discovery phase with the goal of finding out how the existing client’s tech stack was structured. We also wanted to know why it was structured that way, and what were some of the main issues.

We have interviewed stakeholders, subject matter experts conducted a discovery workshop and reviewed a number of corporate documents. In addition, we conducted reviews of other product management solutions, gathered feedback on them. We also reviewed the user experience of the leading brand’s online store to understand how product information can create value for the end customer.

Before working on particular screens we always work on the high-level architecture with the client.

The tool to fit the already existing software environment

For the project, it was vital to create the best tool for the already existing software environment. We used multiple databases to fulfil the client’s needs. The team decided to use Google Cloud Firestore to store documents, Google Big Query for data warehousing, and Algolia for search engine purposes.

The main API was implemented with Express, a JavaScript framework for web applications with a big stack of supporting libraries and a huge community behind it. We used TypeScript as the coding language to add type safety to the platform. The application was hosted on Google App Engine which offers automatic scaling depending on throughput needs, very high availability, A/B testing capabilities, and zero downtime deploy.

We have entrusted EL Passion with building one of the most business critical components in our latest massive e-commerce project. And I’m happy to say that it proved to be the right choice; smooth communication, professional team management and good engineering helped making the solution rock solid and enterprise grade.

Nikolai Fasting

CTO at Pioner Labs