Raffaele Gesulfo

Hub, B2B Platform

Narvar │ Lead Product Design │ 2016 - 2018

Hub is what defines Narvar as a truly self-service SaaS platform. It offers all the settings for retailers to customize their Narvar experience, including brand styling, business rules, analytics dashboards, and carrier integrations.

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. The information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Narvar.

As Lead Product Designer, I designed Hub for speed, flexibility, and scalability.

Hub was the center of a lot of attention from retailers, carriers, and internal users. Evolving requirements, uncertainty, lack of resources were factors that led me to build a design system that would be fast to implement, easy to scale, and flexible enough to avoid design and technical debts.

Onboard to Build

A critical part of my work was to quickly onboard new frontend engineers to the design system. I developed, with the help of a lead frontend engineer, a React components library in Storybook. As well as a simple way for engineers to build new screens and flows with nothing more than a few JavaScript objects.

Grow to Learn

I tend to work on parallel tracks: a vision-driven / long-term one and a need-driven / short-term one. The former would help me inform the latter to prevent any change of direction mid-course and would allow engineers to have a better understanding of how to build the components in a more holistic way. For instance, the Detail View was built with an evolving audience, from knowledgeable internal users to onboarding customers. Moreover, because of ever-changing requirements, I designed a very simple set of components that could be re-arranged at will to form more complex ones. This allowed quick iterations of new paradigms and building user flows with reusability in mind.