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Sam Haslam

UX Engineer / Product Design

© 2026

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Case study

Designing and Building Internal Ecommerce Tools

Improving the usability and scalability of an ecommerce CRM platform—spanning storefront management, campaigns, payments, and analytics.

2021–2026
Designing and Building Internal Ecommerce Tools

Designing and building a scalable UI system for the ecommerce platform teams use to manage products, campaigns, and customer operations.

Alongside customer-facing storefronts and campaign funnels, I worked on the frontend and UX of the NextCommerce platform itself—an ecommerce CRM used by marketers and operators to manage the full lifecycle of a brand.

The platform spans storefront configuration, inventory, payments, analytics, and campaign operations. The core challenge was making that complexity usable, consistent, and scalable without limiting flexibility.


Scope: A Full Ecommerce Operating System

The platform UI needed to support multiple domains within a single experience:

  • Storefront and product configuration
  • Inventory and variant management
  • Campaign and funnel setup
  • Payment flows and order management
  • Analytics and reporting

Improving Usability & Onboarding

A key focus was how users understand and navigate the platform—especially when onboarding new merchants and teams.

  • Simplifying workflows for common tasks (product setup, campaign creation)
  • Reducing cognitive load through clearer layout and hierarchy
  • Standardising interaction patterns across different areas of the platform
  • Making complex configurations easier to reason about

Good UX here isn’t about visual polish—it’s about reducing friction in complex workflows.


App UI Framework

To support consistency at scale, I contributed to the Next Commerce Design System (App UI)—the frontend framework for apps that integrate with the NEXT platform.

App UI design system collage showing forms, KPI cards, alerts, and chart components
App UI building blocks—forms, KPIs, alerts, and chart patterns documented for reuse across platform surfaces.

Built on Bootstrap and distributed via CDN, App UI provides a shared foundation for layout, components, and interaction patterns used across internal tools:

  • Cards, tables, forms, navigation, and feedback components
  • Consistent spacing, typography, and visual hierarchy
  • Reusable patterns for data-heavy interfaces (filters, KPIs, charts)
  • Documented markup examples teams can adopt without reinventing UI
Consistency Shared UI patterns across platform surfaces
Usability Clearer onboarding and faster task completion
Scalability Component system that grows with the product

Frontend Implementation

Beyond UX design, I worked on frontend implementation so the design system translated into maintainable code.

  • Building reusable UI components within the platform
  • Refining layout systems for complex data views
  • Keeping design intent aligned with implementation
  • Balancing flexibility with a maintainable structure

The goal was a system developers can extend efficiently while keeping UI consistency high.


Subscription dashboard cards with MRR, new subscribers, revenue growth, and LTV metrics
Operational cards with KPIs, filters, and header actions.
Sales performance chart with net revenue line over sales and returns bars
Chart patterns for analytics and reporting views.
Analytics data tables for page, device, and browser performance
Data tables for product, order, and inventory workflows.

System Thinking: Complexity → Clarity

Challenge Approach
Multiple domains (products, campaigns, analytics) Unified UI system and navigation patterns
Complex workflows Simplified, structured user flows
Inconsistent UI Shared App UI component system

Outcome

This work improved how teams manage complex ecommerce operations—more consistent UI, clearer workflows, and a shared frontend foundation via App UI.

By aligning the design system with implementation, we created a base that supports current platform features and future growth without reinventing patterns for every surface.