Product Design / E-Commerce System / 2023

SteezeVault & SteezyAdmin — Designing Both Sides of a Fashion E-Commerce System

A dual-interface commerce system for a Lagos fashion brand: one experience for customers browsing and buying, another for the operator managing products, orders, stock, and customers every day.

Overview

Most e-commerce design projects give you one user and one interface. This one gave me two. SteezeVault is a Lagos-based fashion brand selling fine and cool wears. The client needed a complete digital commerce system built from scratch: a storefront where customers could browse and buy, and an admin panel where he could manage everything behind it.

Role: Product Designer

Company: DayneCore Technologies

Client: Ndubuisi

Tools: Figma, Django, Paystack

Challenge

Greenfield projects look simple from the outside. There is no legacy to untangle, no bad decisions to undo. What they actually are is harder: every decision is foundational, and there is no existing system to react against. For SteezeVault and SteezyAdmin, the deeper complexity was the dual audience. The customer arrives in shopping mode, needing clarity, speed, and a checkout experience they can trust. The operator opens SteezyAdmin to run a business, needing dense information without overwhelm.

Discovery

There was no formal usability lab or structured interview cycle. What there was: extended conversations with Ndubuisi about how he ran the business day-to-day — what products he sold, how he tracked orders manually across WhatsApp and memory, and what he needed to see first thing in the morning. Those conversations surfaced operational realities around fulfilment anxiety, product variants, inventory visibility, and pending versus completed orders.

Design Decisions

SteezeVault — the storefront was designed mobile-first, with desktop treated as a responsive extension. Product architecture needed to make sizes, colours, and stock states clear at the moment of decision. The checkout flow was deliberately transparent: a clear order summary before payment, familiar Paystack integration, and confirmation states that left no doubt the transaction completed successfully.

Dashboard Overview

The first screen answers: what do I need to know right now? Recent orders, revenue, and low-stock alerts stay visible without hunting.

Product Management

Variant management for sizes, colours, and stock was organised as a guided flow rather than one dense form.

Order Tracking

A status pipeline made pending, processing, shipped, and fulfilled orders easy to scan and act on.

Customer List

A clean buyer record with contact details and order history, designed for lookup rather than heavy analysis.

Shared System

Both interfaces needed to feel like they belonged to the same product family without being identical. I established a shared visual foundation — colour system, typography, and component patterns — then allowed the customer experience to feel polished and brand-forward while the admin experience shifted toward density and utility.

Outcome

The project was delivered to Ndubuisi with positive client feedback. For DayneCore, the e-commerce work — of which SteezeVault and SteezyAdmin were a core part — contributed to a 25% increase in company project revenue, validating the end-to-end design-to-delivery model we were building.

Reflection

If I were doing this again, I would run at least one structured session with real SteezeVault customers on the checkout flow. Payment drop-off is the most consequential UX failure in Nigerian e-commerce, and while the design is trust-conscious, validating that with actual users before launch would have been the right move. I would also scope the dual-interface work more explicitly from the start: two products means two user mental models, two systems, and two sets of decisions moving in parallel.

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