Zahid Newaz

Wholesale Business Management Software – UI/UX Redesign Case Study

Background

The wholesale industry relies on accurate, fast, and intuitive tools for managing products, sales, and inventory. The existing wholesale business software was functional but outdated. It’s interface was cluttered, unintuitive, and difficult for sales managers and staff to navigate efficiently.
My task was to redesign the system to improve usability, visual hierarchy, and overall user experience without compromising existing workflows.
The project timeline was very short, only about one month due to an urgent business need, which meant I had to put in extra effort and focus to deliver the redesign on time without compromising quality.

My role

I worked as the sole designer and researcher. Responsibilities included :

Conducting user research with sales managers and staff.
Analyzing pain points in the existing software.
Chose a temporary color palette that aligned well with clothing items, ensuring visual harmony even though the platform didn’t yet have finalized brand colors.
Creating wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity UI designs.

Finding Problems

Before making design decisions, I worked with stakeholders to answer two critical questions :

What problem are we solving? – The current UI was visually outdated, lacked intuitive navigation, and caused delays in daily operations.
What’s holding users back? – Poor layout, inconsistent styles, confusing forms, and no visual hierarchy for important data.

Example metric-based insight:
If only 10 out of 100 users could find the correct report on the first try, that’s a 90% navigation failure rate, a major usability problem.

old Design

Research

To understand both user needs and business requirements, I conducted :

Secondary Research – Reviewed competitor software to identify modern patterns and industry trends.

I focused on both :

Qualitative insights – Why users found the system confusing (“I don’t know where to click next”).
Quantitative data – Frequency of errors, average time to generate a report, etc.

Defining the Problem — 5W Method

WHO

Sales managers and wholesale staff

WHAT

Struggle to navigate, interpret, and act on data quickly

WHEN

During daily reporting, inventory checks, and order management

WHERE

Inside modules like Customer Ledger, Inventory Report, and Sales Report, etc.

WHY

The UI lacked modern patterns, clear grouping, and intuitive form flows

Ideation

I explored multiple approaches :

Used clear section headings and proper spacing for better readability.
Grouped related inputs visually to reduce clutter and improve clarity.
Designed a dashboard that highlights valuable insights, mandatory metrics, and frequent actions, enabling users to act faster and more confidently.
Added filters and search options to help users find information quickly.
Applied consistent button styles and standardized action placement across modules.
Created product summaries for easier visualization and quicker understanding.
Introduced a cleaner, modern visual design for faster scanning of information.

redesign

Key Takeaways

When working on this project, I realized that putting the user first is always the most important step, even in business software. Designing around real user needs naturally improves efficiency and satisfaction. I also saw how small visual changes like improving spacing, refining typography, and grouping elements with a clear visual hierarchy, can greatly reduce cognitive load and help users focus on what matters most. Consistency across the system became another key lesson; using the same patterns, colors, and button styles reduced friction and created stronger affordance, so users always knew what to expect. Simplicity proved to be especially powerful. By prioritizing high-frequency actions such as product search, add, and edit, sales managers and staff could complete their tasks with less effort and more speed. Lastly, this project reminded me that research is never done. By continuously testing and validating ideas, I was able to avoid feature bloat and ensure the redesign solved real business problems instead of just looking modern.
If you’re the sole designer working on a product that is still in its early stages, it’s essential to revisit and refine the user journey again and again. Early design decisions often need revalidation as the product evolves. When the platform deals with large amounts of data, it becomes even more important to understand how users interact with that data and what patterns they rely on. Competitor research should also never be a one-time activity. Designers need to continuously monitor competitors, not to copy them, but to gain fresh insights, spot emerging trends, and identify opportunities to make the product stand out.