February 2, 2012 - Comments Off on Shipping Menu Cleanup

Shipping Menu Cleanup

Our e-commerce system was built on the Joomla CMS, and extended over several years, with added features fragmented over several menus and configuration panels. We are extending it, but can't rip it down and build from scratch, since 200 sites are using it for their businesses.

"Shipping" was by far the most-searched keyword in the Help System. First, I made the Shipping Help more findable, and then tackled the underlying problem - poor usability in the Shipping tools themselves. I consolidated the scattered, cluttered Shipping setup options into a single, self-explanatory menu.

Old Shipping Settings scattered over three menus

The "Shipping Menu" itself only had bad choices: four options, all to set up a deprecated shipping system that no one used.

Countries and Zones for shipping and selling to were under “Admin”

Some redundancies had been created during development of the International Shipping system, and never removed. The option to add countries and zones from the menu was dangerous clutter, since the pre-populated list of countries is exhaustive, and you can add a new country from the list itself, if needed.

The list of active and available Shipping Modules was under “Store”

Each module's settings (price breaks, etc) could be configured from the Shipping Module List, but they couldn't be activated. To do that, you needed to go to the "Admin > Configuration" panel!

New Consolidated Shipping Menu

All that fragmentation of function was re-presented in this short menu of four items. Everything under one roof, fewer bad options. Frankly, I'd drop "Custom Shippers" too, but I was outvoted by code-hoarders.

The Shipping Module List itself was also reorganized for clarity, with unused choices deleted and supported modules renamed.

Published by: Philip Williamson in UX/UI

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