Merchant Dashboard Redesign
Lead Brand Designer
Lead Visual Designer
Company / Field
Returnly
B2B SaaS
Services Provided
Brand Design
Visual Design
Design Consultation
Competitive Research & Shareout
Merchant Dashboard Redesign
Lead Brand Designer
Lead Visual Designer
Company / Field
Returnly
B2B SaaS
Services Provided
Brand Design
Visual Design
Design Consultation
Competitive Research & Shareout
CONTEXT
Returnly is a returns management solution that enables shoppers to initiate a return before their original item has been received and processed by the merchant. Merchants primarily interact with Returnly through the Merchant Dashboard, where they can manage returns and exchanges, customize the shopper-facing Return Center, oversee account settings, track analytics, and more. The Merchant Dashboard is exclusively for merchants and cannot be accessed by shoppers.
Returnly is a returns management solution that enables shoppers to initiate a return before their original item has been received and processed by the merchant. Merchants primarily interact with Returnly through the Merchant Dashboard, where they can manage returns and exchanges, customize the shopper-facing Return Center, oversee account settings, track analytics, and more. The Merchant Dashboard is exclusively for merchants and cannot be accessed by shoppers.
The existing dashboard was functional, but there was a clear opportunity to create a more accessible, intentional, and polished user experience. It didn’t accurately reflect the brand — it felt sterile and lacked the intentionality seen amongst competitors. Readability and accessibility best practices weren’t always followed either, and the visual hierarchy wasn’t always intuitive.
Our overall mission was threefold: improve the dashboard’s readability and visual hierarchy, overall look and feel, and bridge the gap between brand and product.
CONSTRAINTS
The key to success in this project was securing stakeholder buy-in. To achieve this, we needed to align everyone on why our proposed design changes were worth the time and effort to implement.
With this in mind, our first step was a competitive audit: analyzing our dashboard alongside competitors’ dashboards and best-in-class examples to identify areas for improvement.
Using insights from the audit, we conducted several rounds of visual explorations. For this exercise, we reimagined four key pages from the Merchant Dashboard, selecting pages that represented a broad range of design elements and challenges while being essential to the overall experience. Our approach was guided by four simple polarities: “playful” vs. “serious” and “technical” vs. “human.”
We based the direction of our visual explorations on four simple polarities: “playful” vs. “serious” and “technical” vs. “human.”
With visuals in hand, it was time to test the waters by sharing our work with the Product team and other cross-functional stakeholders. Since securing stakeholder alignment was crucial, we incorporated light design education into our presentation to ensure everyone understood the impact of our proposed changes.
After outlining the project’s goals and scope, we walked through our competitive audit, which we organized into four key themes: visual hierarchy, readability, cohesion, and brand voice. For each theme, we explained its significance, highlighted areas of opportunity, and compared our current performance to that of our competitors.
The response was overwhelmingly positive. Marketing was excited to see more brand presence within the product, Product and Engineering recognized the value of the work and were eager to collaborate, and even our CEO was enthusiastic about the project’s potential.
Audit Details
Slightly playful.
Very serious.
Somewhat human.
Very technical.