What are the systems, channels and touchpoints involved?

The myELKAY ecosystem supports a continuous order management journey, centralizing fragmented systems into a single portal that enables sales and support reps to maintain visibility, ownership, and customer trust across the entire order lifecycle.

Who are the people we are designing for?

The myELKAY Order Management Portal is a management interface for operations, procurement, and customer support teams who handle large volumes of orders, invoices, and account activity across multiple projects and stakeholders. Such users must juggle tight timelines, budget accountability, and frequent internal and customer inquiries—often while working across multiple systems and data sources. It requires fast, reliable access to order status, billing, shipping, documentation, clear, consolidated views, and reduced back-and-forth communication. The experience prioritizes speed, clarity, and accuracy, enabling teams to confidently answer questions, resolve issues quickly, and keep operations moving without disruption.

Figuring out information architecture.

Card sorting informed these low-fidelity wireframes.

Card sorting was used to validate the information architecture before any screens were designed. By analyzing how users naturally grouped tasks and content, I identified clear, high-agreement categories (Dashboard, Orders, Invoices, Account, Resources, Support) that became the global navigation.

These validated groupings directly informed:

• Page hierarchy and navigation structure
• Search-first, table-driven workflows for Orders and Invoices
• Consolidated order detail views with tabs (billing, shipping, tracking, documents)

Because the IA was already validated, the low-fidelity wireframes focus on structure, flow, and task efficiency rather than visual design—reducing risk before moving into high-fidelity UI and development.

Purpose of Lo-Fi Wireframes?

Collaboration with engineering, and clarity of functional requirements and technical feasibility.

These low-fidelity wireframes were intentionally used as a collaborative working artifact between design, product, and development to validate information architecture, layout logic, and functional requirements across the myELKAY portal. By removing visual styling and brand considerations at this stage, the team was able to focus on technical feasibility, data availability, and task efficiency for key workflows such as login and dashboard access, order search, order details, and supporting resources.

Rapid prototyping and testing of content, and experience prior to user interface visual and brand guidelines.

The simplified layouts enabled rapid usability and A/B testing of navigation structures, content grouping, and interaction patterns, ensuring users could locate information, understand order status, and take action with minimal friction. Feedback from testing and cross-functional reviews informed refinements to navigation, data hierarchy, and flow logic before advancing to high-fidelity, brand-aligned design, reducing rework and aligning early on scalable, buildable solutions.

Usability and A/B Testing

A/B testing to validate the home dashboard IA

Multiple home dashboard layouts were A/B tested to evaluate how users preferred to access core tasks such as Orders, Invoices, Account, and Resources. While testers appreciated seeing detailed order information and customer lookup on earlier dashboard concepts, they consistently viewed this information as secondary.

Testing showed a strong preference for a simpler dashboard with five primary CTAs, allowing users to quickly enter full workflows via navigation rather than processing dense information upfront. The final IA reduced cognitive load by prioritizing clear entry points over detail-heavy summaries.

Usability and A/B testing to validate order search experiences.

Multiple search patterns were A/B and usability tested to support efficient order discovery across large datasets. While a progressive search flow was explored for complex queries, usability testing revealed that users consistently preferred quick search and status-based filters as more intuitive and easier to use. Embedding keyword search directly within the order table further improved efficiency by allowing users to refine results without leaving context. The final search experience prioritizes speed and clarity while still supporting scalable order management needs.

• Quick search and status filters were preferred and perceived as more user-friendly than progressive search
• Progressive search supported edge cases but added unnecessary friction for most workflows
• In-table keyword search reduced context switching and improved task efficiency

The tables serve as the primary interaction surface for order management, designed to support fast scanning, comparison, and action across large datasets. Integrated search within the table allows users to quickly filter results by keywords without rerunning queries or leaving context. Key fields such as order number, date, customer, order type, total, and status are displayed by default, with options to adjust visible columns as needed—keeping the experience efficient, flexible, and task-focused.

Visual concept testing within brand guidelines

Various visualizations of the home dashboard were investigated and tested with Elkay’s design system and brand guidelines. The layout and information architecture did not change but differences around visual hierarchy, color emphasis and the way background was used were made to see how the choices influenced scanability and wayfinding.

The testing results indicated that better contrast in colors and a simplified background were user favourite, which allowed primary actions such as Orders and Invoices to be seen at a glance. Heavier visual treatments would express the brand but also add a higher cognitive load -- cementing the choice to focus on design clarity and task orientation versus decoration in the end product.

What is the Hi-fidelity design?

The myELKAY Order Management Portal applies Elkay’s design system to transform complex order and account data into clear, scannable, and action-oriented interfaces, enabling enterprise users to work efficiently while reinforcing trust in the Elkay brand.