Digital Builder & Uploader

Cedar Mountain

click on images & galleries for full views

My role Product Designer

The team Self led PM & Product Design + Developers

Location Vancouver, BC Canada – 2023/24

Company & Product Context

Cedar Mountain is a Vancouver-based online boutique whose best-selling product, Wall Block Tiles, relied on a manual customization workflow.

As the sole Product Designer, I led the end-to-end design of a scalable digital builder that replaced a fragmented, email-driven process with a structured, self-serve product configuration experience.

My contribution

Product designer, responsible for discovery, UX strategy, interaction design, visual design, and validation across mobile and web experiences.

The Problem

The existing system required heavy interaction with customer and company; almost hands on interaction for each order. This created operational inefficiencies, increased error risk, and introduced friction across the customer journey. The core issue was structural — not visual. The workflow lacked automation, validation logic, and clear interaction architecture, and quite frankly, extremely painful.

Core issue

Customer’s orders involved:

Manual follow-up from the internal design team
Email-based image transfers
Repeated customer communication for adjustments
No true online checkout for custom orders

My Approach

Discovery

I mapped the full service blueprint across customer and internal workflows to identify pain points of redundancy, breakdowns, and constraint dependencies. Stakeholder and customer interviews surfaced recurring confusion around file requirements, layout expectations, and order finalization and check-out experience.

Interaction Architecture

Before wire-framing and ideation, I wanted to map out the user journey so that the goals and struggles were laid out appropriately. Instead of digitizing the existing process, I restructured it.

Click thumbnail for full view

Findings & Goal Initiatives

The goal was reducing cognitive load while preserving production accuracy.

Needs

I designed a guided configuration flow that:

Introduced progressive disclosure for technical inputs
Applied constraint-based logic to prevent invalid submissions
Delivered real-time visual feedback
Embedded validation before checkout

Define & Validate

Wireframing and Testing

Using Figma, I built interactive prototypes to test usability, decision clarity, and user confidence. I validated flows with both customers and internal teams to ensure alignment with manufacturing constraints.

Insights informed a few iteratitive refinements to hierarchy, micro-interactions, and state feedback.

High-Fidelity System Design & Implementation

I developed a clean, brand-aligned UI supported by reusable components and scalable interaction patterns – for both Web/Desktop & Mobile. During handoff, I partnered closely with engineering to maintain UX integrity through implementation.