Clippings is an online platform that procures designer furniture & lighting products. The company also handles project planning and invoicing with interior designers.

This project started with a clear objective from the founders to me and the head of product: “we want to revolutionise the interior design industry”.

Clippings.com was already a platform where designers could source a wide range of furniture products. The founders wanted to move from this e-commerce proposition to a SaaS based product for interior designers.

There were numerous ideas already suggested about how Clippings might do this. These were absorbed and a process of discovery was started.

After interviewing several interior designers and taking the existing understanding within the company of the industry, we developed a large scale journey map of the interior designers’ project process.

From here, we highlighted the parts of the journey where we felt Clippings would be able to provide the most value, from an existing platform perspective, and considering effort vs impact for the interior designer and Clippings as a business.

It was determined that the specifying part of the process was the area to focus on, so more research was conducted.

We evaluated that interior designers have a difficult and fragmented work flow, where the majority of their time is spent on multiple spreadsheets and email comms.

Project “schedule” spreadsheet

Developing concepts

We continually spoke with interior designers to understand in detail what their processes are when designing and putting together a project, and as a result, we became familiar with their tools and products that they use to manage projects. This directly led into the development of concepts that we refined and took back to our panel of designers for feedback. Elements of desktop software, spreadsheet tools and even Pinterest coming through in the designs.

Projects

We eventually landed on 'Projects', a location on Clippings where users can create projects and save products. Projects contained multiple features that kept the familiarity of interior designers' existing workflow:

Board view — A place where designers can create a visual representation of their project, similar to moodboards, allowing them to organise products into spaces (collections of products).

Schedule view — The project spreadsheet tracker they are accustomed to. This enables them to track and view how the project is going, and displays additional tabular detail at a glance.

Development

Product areas and features were scoped with the engineering team and plotted against a 6-month deadline.

While working with the engineering lead to manage the development process, I acted as both product designer & product manager during this 6-month period, delivering the user interface and writing the feature specifications/user-stories.

Usability testing & launch

When we had a near complete version of the final product, we ran workshop sessions to gather holistic feedback on everything that had been developed, working feedback into the product before launching to a wider audience.

Improved processes

After launching publicly to interior design studios, feedback was gathered from designers who had been using the platform consistently since launch. Feedback was positive and some studios had considered replacing the spreadsheets that they had been using for the projects tool.

Internally at Clippings, after two months of launching, a third of Clippings' managed accounts became self-serve using the projects tool, meaning that it enabled interior designers to specify and purchase for their projects, without account manager involvement, reducing that teams workload.


Reworking the navigation

In addition to the work on Projects, I also redesigned the sites navigation. With projects now being more of a focus, we shifted the navigation to having a single search bar & mega-nav approach, moving and simplifying the categories into a cleaner list and reworking, but keeping existing autocomplete functionality.

Glossary

Mega-navigation

Drag and drop projects interaction

Credits

Product: Thom
Engineering: Danail, Philip, Evstati, Rusi