Case study 01 · GHCM

Designing systems around how a retail business actually works.

The important work was not the public website. It was a connected set of internal systems serving store managers, accounting staff, inventory users, marketing staff, and customers—each with a different view of the same business.

Context

Design from inside the business.

GHCM grew from one clothing store to five locations in Brooklyn and Manhattan, with approximately fifteen full-time employees plus part-time staff at its peak. I was not an outside designer learning the operation through a short discovery phase; I was helping run it.

That proximity made the systems less abstract. Financial reporting, inventory control, targeted email, store operations, equipment, and staff workflows were parts of the same operating environment.

Income & expense reporting Inventory management Customer email Store portal / CMS Employee timekeeping External sites

01 · Financial reporting

One set of data. Several ways of understanding it.

Store managers and accounting staff worked with the same financial information, but they organized it differently. The design preserved one source of truth while letting each role begin with the business question appropriate to its work.

Annotated first drill-down from the GHCM income and expense reporting design — **1 · Begin with business context**Company, store, year, category, accounting view, and comparison.

Annotated transaction-level drill-down from the GHCM income and expense reporting design — **2 · Reveal transaction detail**Summary gives way to individual purchases only when investigation requires it.

Annotated editing, permissions, comments, and history view from GHCM — **3 · Support action and accountability**Permissions, comments, history, attribution, and related vendor information.

Company or store → expense category → individual transaction.

Progressive disclosure supported both scanning and investigation. Functions appeared at the level where they became relevant instead of competing for attention on the first screen.

02 · Inventory

“Easy to use” depended on who was using it.

Inventory users differed sharply in confidence and speed. Rather than force both groups through one compromised interface, the system offered two paths built around different kinds of simplicity.

Expert user

Visibility and speed

More information available at once
Fast repetitive entry
Fewer interruptions and extra steps
Efficiency over guided simplicity

More deliberate user

Guidance and error prevention

Fewer simultaneous choices
Reduced cognitive load
More deliberate progression
Lower opportunity for input error

Evidence status: the original portfolio text documenting this decision survives, but the two inventory-interface images have not yet been recovered. The final portfolio should state that directly rather than reconstruct evidence we do not have.

03 · Customer communication

Customer behavior became part of the next interaction.

The email system did more than send a message. It let staff build audiences from buying characteristics—including designer, style, size, season, and occasion—and then independently select content and visual treatment.

Annotated GHCM email composition workflow — **Surviving email-composition flow**Audience, content, visual treatment, preview, and delivery are distinct stages.

Select audience→Select content→Select visual treatment→Preview→Send or schedule

Separating those decisions allowed the audience, message, and presentation to vary independently while remaining part of one understandable workflow.

This is early evidence of a theme that appears much later in my career: customer information becomes valuable when it changes what the organization does next.

04 · External sites

The visually obvious work was not the important work.

The public sites establish breadth and implementation experience. But they were relatively simple portals. The stronger experience-design story was in the operational systems behind the business.

Examples of GHCM external retail websites — **GHCM external websites**Useful supporting evidence, but not the centerpiece of the case.

What deserved emphasis instead

Role-based financial information, expert and guided inventory workflows, operational drill-down, accountability, and customer segmentation were the more substantial design problems.

The case is therefore about experience design across the operating system of a retail business—not simply web design for a retailer.

What the work left behind

The evidence attached to this job.

These links also populate the artifact index under Work by Type. They belong to this case; the index simply provides another route to them.

Financial information architectureFirst drill-downTransaction detailFull annotated design Permissions & accountabilityEdit rightsCommentsChange historyUser attribution Inventory interaction strategyExpert pathGuided pathEvidence note Customer communicationAudience selectionEmail composition flowVisual templates

External implementationCorporate siteRetail sites

Case takeaway

The interface followed the user’s relationship to the business.

Accounting staff, store managers, expert operators, less-confident users, and marketing staff were not forced into the same representation. Shared systems were shaped around how each group needed to understand and act.

Role-based information architecture Progressive disclosure and complex data Expert versus guided interaction design Customer segmentation and workflow design

Continue through the chronological portfolio.

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