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How strategic design transformed a neglected tool into a valuable platform for merchants and internal product teams.
GOAL SETTING
Introduction
Shortly after I joined Bolt in late 2021, I led an initiative to refactor the surface used for all of our merchant facing experiences — the merchant dashboard.
I inherited a product that had never benefited from much design consideration, it mostly consisted of disparate screens put together by engineers who were more focused on shipping features, rather than considering a holistic merchant experience.
The problem
The merchant dashboard reached a point where it could not scale to accommodate new products and capabilities.
The original dashboard was built for a single use case—Bolt Hosted Checkout and bundled payments. But as Bolt’s ambitions grew, so did its product lineup. In meetings across the company, I saw teams solving similar merchant experience problems in silos, often unaware of each other’s work and duplicating effort like items lost in a junk drawer. I wanted to change that.
Who are the users?
The merchant dashboard is a back office tool for eCommerce merchants using Bolt products like accelerated checkout. Users range from those focused on onboarding and monitoring to others handling daily tasks like refunds and disputes.
Project goals
I kicked the project off by identifying two fundamental goals that could act as a north star in what I knew would be a long process, involving multiple teams and stakeholders.
Improve Usability Today
We set out to fix UX debt in the merchant dashboard and enhance navigation for customers, giving merchants a consistent experience where new features feel familiar and easy to adopt.
Prepare to Scale Tomorrow
I wanted the team to coalesce around a scalable merchant platform, laying the groundwork for future products and enabling faster, high-quality launches.
RESEARCH
Card Sorting
One of the primary complaints from users was the difficulty of finding things. While internal stakeholders inversely struggled with figuring out where to place new capabilities.
Given this, our first order of business was to run a card sorting study with merchants. This would help us shape a mental model of how various capabilities should be grouped and eventually help shape the future IA.
Methodology
Open card sorting with 41 cards — participants came up with their own categories and no predefined categories were given.
Cards were phrased as an action instead of the current category name. (e.g., “Manage who has access to this tool” instead of “Users”)
Participants
5 Total: (7 SMB Owners & 8 eCommerce Managers)
GMV: <3M (7), 3M - 10M (4), 10M+ (4)
Criteria: Uses an eCommerce dashboard daily
Platforms used: Shopify, Magento, Salesforce, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Weebly, Wix
This study was led by our amazing UX researcher, Horyun Song. I was involved in shaping the card names, determining demographics, and I sat in on some of the guided sessions.
DESIGN
Information Architecture
The card sorting study helped us define the new IA. There were some patterns in the data that informed groupings that made intuitive sense. Where there were gaps and inconsistencies we used our best judgement or leaned on convention.
One thing that we tried to keep in mind is how this structure would eventually scale as we added new products and features to the dashboard in the future.
IA Map
DESIGN
Navigation Design
Based on the IA we developed, I set out to design a navigation pattern that would fit our needs today, and hopefully accommodate changes in the future. The last part being especially important as I knew Bolt’s product strategy was rapidly evolving.
Primary Navigation
The first big decision was to ditch the website style horizontal nav bar and go with a classic left-hand navigation menu typical for web based apps. This decision was driven by the ability to show more of the IA by taking advantage of vertical (and scrolling) space — promoting easier discovery, and faster access compared to forcing users to dig through multiple drop-down menus in the old menu.
L2 Navigation
For particularly deep parts of the IA, we needed additional levels of navigational structure. The administration section for example leveraged a drill-down pattern that revealed a sub nav menu when accessed.
L2 Navigation Pattern
Horizontal Tabs
Additionally, we established a standardized horizontal tab pattern for subsections within a L1 page.
Horizontal Tabs for Sub-Sections
Durability of the navigation desgin
Flash forward! almost two years later, our product portfolio had evolved. This had not come as surprise, since flexibility was one of the main considerations for the original design. We were able to accommodate the necessarily changes to IA with very minimal impact to engineering and to users’ familiarity with the dashboard.
DESIGN
Templates & Guides
In order to promote faster decision making and consistent patterns that users could learn and rely on, we invested some time in developing guidelines for common use cases throughout the merchant experience.
Templates & Guides
RESEARCH
Usability Study
We ran a series of unmoderated usability tests comparing our current dashboard UI to a prototype of the new design.We ran a series of unmoderated usability tests comparing our current dashboard UI to a prototype of the new design.
Methodology
We asked participants to perform a selection of 7 tasks that represented common tasks across the dashboard, including tasks we suspected to be problem areas that we intend to fix with this redesign.
We tested for success rate and expectation matching.
Participants
15 Total
GMV: <3M (7), 3M - 10M (4), 10M+ (4)
Criteria: Uses an eCommerce dashboard daily
Platforms used: Shopify, Magento, Salesforce, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Weebly, Wix
Results Summary
In most cases, users found the new design easier to navigate with things placed more or less where they expected them to be. Some tasks performed similarly. We also found some usability issues in the new design that we have since addressed in a new iteration of the prototype.
PROCESS
Execution
As we approached a v1 of the new dashboard, momentum was strong. Engineering was turning designs into builds almost as quickly as I could produce them.
However, other product priorities were closing in, and I began to sense a real risk that the project could be deprioritized.
Rather than resist it, I chose to embrace the shift and highlight how those emerging priorities could benefit from the foundational components we were already developing for the merchant dashboard, enabling them to be built faster and with greater consistency.
Careful Planning
We knew the rollout would require careful planning. To keep momentum and unblock critical features, we intentionally descoped a few areas of legacy feature parity to accelerate our path to market. I proposed a phased approach that introduced a beta period, followed by a measured sunset window for legacy merchants once we reached general availability.
RESULTS
Key New Features
After our GA launch, we quickly capitalized on the modularity and scalability of the new dashboard and developed several new frameworks that would improve merchants quality of life, and more importantly, get them using our products quicker.
RESULTS
Conclusion
This initiative was a huge undertaking, involving many people across engineering, product, and design. Ultimately the effort was worth while.
Some of the key results we achieved where:
Enable teams to build an launch valuable products faster. The new merchant dashboard unlocked at least 5 new products that would otherwise be very difficult to get off the ground
We reduced the average time for merchants to onboard from weeks to days while getting them into the product in a matter of minutes.
