Operational UX - Not Just Customer UX
When people talk about UX, they usually mean the bit your customers see. The site. The checkout. The emails.
But there’s another side to UX that rarely gets mentioned: how it feels for your team to run everything day to day.
In our chat with Tim Martin-Harvey, Head of Ecommerce at The Bottle Club, he touched on this:
“The first tab I open up almost everyday is…Better Reports in Shopify…[looking at the data and asking] how did the last couple of days go? What do I need to speak to the warehouse about?”
He wasn’t talking about design patterns or conversion funnels. He was talking about the systems that feed into the customer experience.
The operational UX - the layer that connects data, process and people. When it works, things feel calm and predictable. When it doesn’t, small frustrations build up and start to show up for customers too.
Beyond the storefront
A messy spreadsheet in the warehouse becomes a missing item in a basket.
A mis-categorised product becomes a lost sale.
A clunky admin screen becomes a customer complaint.
Most UX work stops at the front end because that is what everyone can see. But it’s the experience behind the scenes that decides whether that front end can actually do its job.
Tim’s tabs - reports, dashboards, warehouse chats - tell the real story of ecommerce. It’s not just “the website” and “the warehouse”. It’s a chain of small experiences that all join up.
The aim isn’t just to design a nice looking site. It’s to design a business that runs smoothly.
Why operational UX matters
If your warehouse software is hard to use, your pickers will make mistakes.
If your CMS makes category changes painful, products will end up in the wrong place.
If your reporting tools don’t line up with your KPIs, your team will chase the wrong numbers.
Every bit of friction inside the business has a way of turning into friction for customers. Slower fulfilment. More “where is my order?” tickets. More refunds and one-time buyers.
When you improve operational UX you tend to see fewer support tickets, faster fulfilment and a team that has a bit more headspace. Customers feel the benefit too, because you are not fighting the system all day.
Designing for everyone
Operational UX is about treating your team as users, not just operators.
It means asking:
Can people find what they need quickly?
Do our tools fit how we actually work, or do they force workarounds?
Could a new starter figure this out without extensive onboarding?
It also means bringing operations, fulfilment and finance into the conversation, not only marketing and product. The people who live in these systems all day usually know exactly where the rough edges are.
A great ecommerce store isn’t just the sum of its pixels. It is the sum of its processes.
If you want to improve UX, don’t just look at what the customer sees. Look behind the scenes first.
This article is part of our Open Tabs series, where we talk to founders about the realities of running an ecommerce business day to day. Watch the full episode with Tim from The Bottle Club here.
