Zoho Design
Zoo DesignYou' ll learn how to be a Visual Designer. Complimentary interview details published anonymously by Zoho interview candidates.
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Explore shadow, transparence, colors, designs, and designs to make the best motif for your work. Develop shapes that look good on any device, even on the go. Think about your corporate branding in your printed documents by attaching your corporate design and adjusting the colours and typefaces of the design. Full mastery of all the components of your shape will make your mark stands out from the mass.
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Zoo inventory: A glimpse into our UI/UX design process
Recently we introduced Zoho Warehouse, our stock and order handling system. It is our aim not only to make sure that every single item is great to use, but also to make the overall user interface uniform. It is important because our creations are built from the bottom up to work together and can be used together.
Let's see how we did it for Zoho Inventory. Uniform, consistently cross-product expertise. When I wrote my earlier paper about how we recreated Zoho Books, our on-line bookkeeping tool, I was talking about how we enhanced the entire UX through a great deal of experimenting and studying. At first sight Zoho Inventory looks very similar to Zoho Books.
That'?s because we made it that way. Then we used the same base design framework and constructed it from there upwards. Many of our designs retain this design style: Invoice Zoho, Books Zoho, Subscriptions Zoho and Editions Zoho. The unified design provides a degree of UX and cross-product visibility that you won't find when integrating third-party applications from different vendors. a) Identify ing the most important design challenges.
Problem orientated thought structures the whole design proces. Zoho Inventory's complete stock and order processing revolves around the administration of customer orders and orders. Prior to starting to design the UX to address these issues, we needed a greater understanding of how shopkeepers and asset administrators address these issues in the physical environment. b) Following in the footsteps of the users.
Likewise, you can't create a great usability without exactly what they want. This is the only way you will actually design something that is easy to use and allows the end users to get things done as quickly as possible. Fortunately, we had all the information we needed before we began to design the Zoho Inventory GUI.
We have been operating Zoho Books and Zoho CRM for many years and have had many enquiries for a warehouse administration system that is directly integrated into these Items. Here is just one example of how a client asked for a merchandise planning and control system in our forum over 4 years ago. It gave us direct insight into literally thousands of real-world situations and issues that needed to be solved by a special asset tracking system.
As a result of all these experiences, we had a very good understanding of what kind of softwares our customers wanted before we even began the design for them. In addition, we opened an early accessible release of Zoho Inventory for over 700 concurrent customers a few month before its release. We would never have gained this knowledge by working on UX, only with in-house design and managerial input.
They need to get users feed-back to create a great usability environment. You get better design when you hear other peoples. c) You get a structure: Design of the information architecture and wireframe. We have seen that asset manager have to deal with a high information complexities in order management.
It was the aim of the design of the graphical environment to enable the users to deal with all this information and to react quickly. It begins with the design of an information architectural design - this is essentially a presentation of all information that needs to be followed by the users and how it should be organised in a hierarchical way.
This is the fundamental information the operator needs to keep track of when managing orders: It' s quite easy, but that's the essential part of the information architectures, and it's a good example of the complexities and endless number of use cases the users have to deal with. However, the definitive surface should allow the users to deal with all this information and take measures.
Wireframes represent a framework for all the fragmentary issues and thought patterns that run through the designer's mind. Using the existing information architectures, we have assembled a wireless frame that provides simple accessibility to all the information you need in a customer order, and all the actions you need to take can be performed directly from that surface. d) Nail the design visually.
Designing visuals is crucial to the overall sucess of a given brand. Research has shown that in less than 50 ms, consumers create opinion on the basis of design. An optically attractive design prepares the operator for good expectation even before he uses your products. As soon as this first image is made, the consumer tends to look at the whole item through a bright lense.
It is important to also have a uniform optical perception. A good design has to stretch from your website to your whole products to get that good look. Keeping all this in the back of our minds and after many experiments, we have put together the above design for Zoho Inventory with great care.
There are no fixed stages in creating something that looks good because design is a creation in itself. We have, however, chosen to use fundamental design vision as a guide for the design of our processes. The legibility of interface items is one of the fundamental items you need to insure.
and it worked wonderfully. Whereas for many of our items (e.g. Zoho Books) we opted for a paste-style colour pattern, for Zoho Inventory we did something different by opting for a deep and shallow colour pattern that combines element of blacks and blues.
Incons: Inconsistencies help provide important information that cannot be reached by text alone. Symbols had to be chosen that not only made sense, but also completed the remainder of the design decisions. There was a discussion in our design department about whether we should select empty symbols or fixed symbols.
In the end, we chose a number of empty symbols, which we deduced were better suited for displaying physical entities such as things and packets (which administrators face every day) than sound symbols. VIEWAL HIERARCHY: While the design, hierarchies, and grouping of the various components were defined in the wireframming lifecycle, we needed to differentiate these components visibly in the design phase so that the users could know where to find what.
Asset Lifecycle Planning solutions are complicated. We wanted it to be so simple to use that the users should be able to use it and do things even when they wake up in the morning. This means keeping the users through each individual characteristic and making available information exactly when they need it.
So we had to provide the users with information at the right moment so that they could do what they needed to do, such as the markings on the street, which would show them the right way to their destinations. Such information must be made available to the users in any way. And, of course, good assistance is vital so that the users get the information they need.
Users must remove themselves from the application to receive information. Suppose you provided the users with all the information they needed exactly when they needed it? In order to achieve this, we chose to add information of relevance to the UI. As an example, the end users need help if they need to intergrate Zoho Inventory with another one.
Zooho Inventory has many implementations. Zoho Inventory lets you easily add eBay, Amazon, Etsy and Shopify. Directly within Zoho Inventory we have high profile instruction on how to fit into any market place and how each fit will work. Explain how Zoho Inventory identifies elements of your inventory (such as products and order information) on the plaza and how they are identified on the plaza.
In this way, clients gain the necessary know-how to be able to integrate Zoho Inventory into these markets. While this is nothing really new, the contextual provision of this information is new in an easy to digest way directly in the UI. One of the most important ideas to be published in the near term is the Bucket Viewer - something that is truly unparalleled for Zoho Inventory.
At times, an overloaded warehouse keeper just needs the answers to the questions: If you are taking stock for your organization, you may need to respond to these frequently asked survey requests for potentially several hundred bundles at different phases of the ordering lifecycle. Displays a graphical summary of all parcels in the order lifecycle.
When you are an asset administrator dealing with a large number of parcels, your eye is likely to grow and think about how much simpler you could make your task if you had acces to this visibility. Warehouse management's got super powers, babe! Stock control is complicated.