How to Systematically Design Backend Products: A 7‑Stage Case Study

1. Redesign Business Goal Setting

The project targets the "Kujiale In‑Store Purchase" reporting‑form management backend, where brand merchants review leads, assign them to stores, and handle reward settlements. Initially built without interaction or visual input, the backend suffered from poor user experience, prompting a redesign based on extensive feedback and newly defined goals.

2. Problem Discovery Using the Interaction Five Elements

Applying the classic interaction‑five‑elements framework (scene, user, medium, behavior, goal), the team broke the complex workflow into smaller scenarios, examined user demands and pain points, and recombined them to form a comprehensive view of the business’s user needs.

3. Applying the Double‑Diamond Model for Problem Solving

After identifying issues, the team used the double‑diamond approach (problem focus → solution decomposition) to cluster related problems, uncover underlying root causes, and formulate a coherent solution strategy.

4. User Demand Research and Integration

Through qualitative and quantitative collaboration with the business team, extensive user scenarios, goals, and behaviors were collected. A user‑experience map visualized these data, allowing extraction of common and core demands for each scenario.

5. Product Problem Discovery and Consolidation

Comparing user demands with the current product revealed gaps, which were grouped using the double‑diamond model. Two co‑creation workshops distilled these into five core problems.

6. Defining and Breaking Down Redesign Directions

Combining the redesign goals with cost considerations, the team prioritized issues, defined three strategic directions, and further split them into actionable points mapped to each user scenario, ensuring comprehensive coverage of improvement opportunities.

7. Interaction and Visual Design

Based on the defined directions, the interaction and visual design phases produced optimized workflows and UI layouts, focusing the majority of effort on earlier analysis and opportunity identification rather than on the final visual execution.

8. Reflections on Better Design Empowerment

Common collaboration challenges—unclear business direction and difficulty for stakeholders to grasp design proposals—were addressed by framing discussions around user needs, using the user‑experience map to illustrate findings, and encouraging co‑creation, thereby improving acceptance of design solutions.