Dow - My Account

UI/UX

Brandwidth

2022 - 2024

Website

3 Designers:

• 1 Lead
• 1 Senior (me)
• 1 Junior

3-4 Project Managers

10+ Developers

My Account is the ordering system used throughout Dow to purchase materials, organize product and customer lists, and track orders. Its utilities also includes catalogs for products and brands, invoicing and returns systems, customer and contract management dashboards, and an admin backend- all of which ties into multiple different cart systems.

Brandwidth was tasked with giving the entire enterprise a facelift, removing redundancies, and streamlining the customer’s ordering experience. Our primary goals for My Account were, broadly speaking:

• reorganize the existing login-side navigation to be scalable and have room for the inclusion of new CTAs and subnavigation
• retroactively update older layouts to meet Dow’s newer branding and design standards, in addition to having layouts that were responsive for tablets and mobile devices
• make the ordering and cart system a uniform and simplified experienced across dow.com and My Account, regardless of the user’s role
• create the ability/flow for favoriting and reordering entire invoice’s worth of products
• create a Quick Order system to simplify frequent reorders
• create a Favorite system for individual products as well as creating Favorite Products lists
• create a dashboard so once the user logs in, they can jump anywhere they need to
• completely reskin and reorganize the Admin experience

These goals would, not only accomplish the simplification/modernization aspects of the user’s experience, it would allow us a stronger skeleton to operate upon from a design standpoint so we could begin integrating elements and rules of the Dow Design System (more on that project here).

As the senior designer, the majority of my tasks across the My Account system involved:

• making quick proof-of-concept wireframes
• creating production-ready designs based on wires and component library
• maintaining updates to My Account components and layouts as the Dow Design System was being created and refined
• testing future and in-progress designs against usability and a11y standards

I also liased throughout iteration processes with our lead designer to ensure consistency, doublecheck ideas and actionable items, as well as ensuring there was no overlap with other My Account assignments since we would often be working within the same files at the same time. We would also have walkthroughs with Brandwidth’s and Dow’s developers to make sure components/layout changes were feasible in the limitations of dow.com’s framework.

There were also multiple daily check-ins with Brandwidth’s project managers that were in charge of particular items, as well as sitting in on and leading client-facing presentations reviews when needed.

The biggest difficulties we had throughout this project were balancing the My Account designs parallel to the Dow Design System progress, which was also forced to start at the same time. The benchmarks for My Account accomplishments were often handed down from outside of the design team’s purview, affecting the crunch of both projects.

With both projects both running hand in hand, we would timeline as far ahead as we could to see where the gaps and intersections would be between them. This would allow us to plan/refine parts of the design system ahead of time and make the updates to My Account with the new components/component replacements not as costly in time/effort on both the design and development sides.

For cost cutting measures, Brandwidth’s developers and programmers were put in backup roles on this project in favor of Dow’s outsourced development team in China. The handful of conversations with this outside team were not always productive since they boxed themselves years ago into using Wordpress templates and Bootstrap 2.3 JS parameters. Despite the insistence and demonstrations by BW’s developers that the backend and frontend needed updating (and that this was the perfect avenue with which to introduce those updates), the Dow team stated this was the only way to build our proposed updates with the budgets/timeframes allowed.

Brandwidth was also operating without someone consistently filling the design director role for most of 2023 and all of 2024, leaving double duty on My Account and all other projects to be split between our agency’s two design leads.

As this was a gargantuan project, we released the new designs in phases. All feedback and metrics were relayed back to us from Dow directly (exact figures omitted for confidentiality purposes).

The inclusion of the dashboard made users feel like their account was more personalized, ultimately using the dashboard CTAs as much as the main navigation for starting their journey. This has lead to faster, more frequent ordering. We were also told that users would often explore newer product spotlights more, even if they didn’t ultimately purchase them.

The introduction of the Dow Design System standardizations and components in the rolled out sections inspired a lot of comments like “I can read that much easier now” or “this *feels* so much nicer” and “I love that this will actually work on my phone now.” Additionally, support tickets for “I can’t find how to get to X” dropped by over 50% after the proposed navigation redesigns were instated.

Before the redesigns, the entire My Account system was cartoonishly cluttered and outdated. It had a lack of focus and ease of use that the public-facing dow.com experience has. Now, people purchasing products through Dow finally have a modern-feeling interface and a smoother experience.