Abbreviations Work- Nordstrom
Updated the column headers to title case and researched proper abbreviations to reduce space
WORK DONE
Updated content guidelines, updated column headers tool wide
MAKE OF THE TEAM
Content Designer, UX Designer, Product Manager
01
About Closeouts
• In retail, closeouts is when vendors offer the store their overstock for a discount. Our buyers have a limited amount of time (typically 24 hours) to go over these offers and need to decide which offers to accept or reject quickly.
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• With their old system (Excel spreadsheets), this timeline meant that a lot of opportunities were being missed.
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• Our newly designed tool is meant to help expedite this process so that our buyers don’t miss out any good deals. This new tool is part of a bigger platform called Retail Hub that is currently being built.
02
AG Grid Column Headers
• Through the whole Retail Hub space, we utilize AG Grid to lay out the data that our users upload in their respective tools.
• One of my jobs was to make sure that the column headers were consistent throughout the whole space.
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• Before I started this project, some guidelines were already established for the headers, mainly putting the words into sentence case and spelling out most of them.
03
03
Problem: Column headers are too long
• In the Closeouts tool, this section contains some of our longest headers in the table, like Nordstrom replenishment list cost or Nordstrom dropship list cost, and a lot of them were being cut off because of character count.
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• Users could expand the columns as long as they wanted, but subject matter experts (SMEs) wanted as many headers to be shown as possible because it was a little tough to scan and find the proper column without manually expanding the title.
04
Switching to Abbreviations
• Product reached out to me and asked if we could put abbreviations in the header. That went against the header guidelines, but since our guidelines were still maturing, I took this as an opportunity to explore what we could do.
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• With the help of Product, I got a list of common abbreviations that the SMEs were familiar with in this space.
• However, a lot of these abbreviations were 1-3 letters and the sentence case would make them a lot harder to scan and read. So I thought the only way to make these headers more legible was to switch to title case.
05
Getting Buy-in from the Content Design Team
• I decided that I wanted to bring the title case proposal to The Retail Hub's content design team. I explained that, while sentence case did have better scannability for headers in general, it would not do well with the newly added abbreviations.
They both agreed with the change and would set out to update the headers and guidelines for the rest of the tool.
06
Adding in the Abbreviations
• This is what the headers looked like with the abbreviations added. It’s a lot cleaner with a lot less cut off and much more scannable.
07
Next Steps
• To help with consistency through the Retail Hub, the content design team and I created a list of abbreviations we could use for consistency purposes.
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​• The rest of the the team would go on to update the rest of the headers in the tool and document any nuances where using abbreviations might not be the best option.
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