The platform had been running successfully for over a decade, but 98% of its users were on mobile and the experience had never been built for them. It was a desktop product being used on phones — functional enough that users stayed, but frustrating enough that they were beginning to leave for newer competitors. The challenge wasn't just redesigning for mobile. It was doing so for a product with an established user base that had built real workflows around the existing interface, however imperfect. Any redesign that ignored those habits risked alienating the people the platform already served. The client needed a product that felt new to new users and still felt familiar enough to existing ones.
The starting point was the client's own user feedback — a decade of support tickets, complaints, and feature requests from people who understood the platform deeply. That was treated as primary research. From there, I mapped the complete dropshipping workflow from the user's perspective: how products get discovered, evaluated, priced, and listed, and where the current platform created unnecessary friction at each stage. The redesign prioritised the highest-frequency daily tasks first — product browsing, profit calculation, order management — and rebuilt those flows around mobile interaction patterns before addressing lower-frequency admin functions. The goal was that the most common actions should require the fewest steps, on any device, at any network speed.
Navigation was rebuilt entirely around thumb reach rather than adapted from desktop conventions. The existing structure assumed a cursor and a wide screen. Mapping actual task frequency against mobile ergonomics produced a different hierarchy — one that felt unfamiliar on first look but significantly reduced the steps required for the actions users performed most often.
A profit calculator was integrated directly into product pages rather than existing as a separate tool. Dropshippers were calculating margins manually or leaving the platform to use external calculators. Embedding the tool at the point of product evaluation removed a step that was causing users to lose focus and, in some cases, not return.
The admin experience was redesigned in parallel with the user-facing product rather than after it. On the previous platform, admin tools had been added incrementally over ten years and had no coherent structure. Designing both sides simultaneously allowed role-based logic to be built into the information architecture from the start rather than retrofitted.
The frontend was built with Vue.js components designed to be device-agnostic from the ground up. Given the diversity of devices in the existing user base — ranging from current smartphones to much older hardware — performance on lower-spec devices was treated as a baseline requirement, not an edge case to optimise for later.
of the user base was mobile — the entire platform was rebuilt around that reality
The redesign is complete and in active development, dependent on a parallel platform integration before launch. The delivered work includes a full mobile-first design system, complete wireframes across all user journeys for both dropshippers and administrators, an interactive prototype validated with the client, and a Vue.js component architecture ready for implementation. The platform is positioned to reduce support load through self-service tools, improve mobile task completion rates, and give administrators coherent control over a product that had grown without structural design oversight for a decade. Outcomes will be measurable once the platform launches.
The hardest part of this project wasn't the design — it was knowing which existing user behaviours were worth preserving and which were just familiarity with something broken. I would spend more time on that distinction earlier. Some habits users had built around the old platform reflected genuine needs that the redesign had to respect. Others were workarounds for bad design that users had stopped noticing. Separating those two things more rigorously at the start would have made some of the later decisions faster and more confident.