Get to Know Miva 10: The History and Evolution of the Miva UI

At this exciting point in the two-year redesign journey of Miva 10, we want to share a video that reveals a bit of what’s in store for this next major release.

As a bit of background to this video, we thought it would be fun to look back at the history of Miva’s user interface to show just how we got to where we are today (and where we’re headed).

It all began in 1997…

Let’s go back a couple decades and take a look at the first version of Miva, back when it was called “KoolCat” and looked exactly like you would expect a web application to look in 1997.

Check out those tables!

KoolCat eventually evolved into Miva Merchant 1, which was the foundation of the core of the UI for several years—a frame-based UI with an expandable navigation tree in the left panel.

Learn more about the history of Miva Merchant

Miva Merchant 9.0 (Released 2014):

In Miva Merchant 9.0, the pinned left menu was replaced by a drop-down menu and a new global search provides easy navigation anywhere across the admin.

While there have been subtle improvements to the Version 9 User Interface (UI) over the past five years, what you see above is generally reflective of what the Miva user interface looks like today. Now, we’ll take a look at what’s in store for the future of the Miva UI.

Looking Ahead

For the 10th generation of Miva Merchant, we knew it was time for an admin UI refresh. While we rarely receive negative feedback on the “look and feel” of the Miva interface, what we do hear is that certain tasks are currently more difficult to perform than they should be.

We take this feedback very seriously because it means that, even if our interface looks great, the user experience needs to improve and enhance ease of use.

Those type of complaints are worse than “your interface feels dated”. They mean that the experience for the user is suboptimal and needs to have a greater focus on ease of use.

With this in mind, we set about creating the future of Miva. We really wanted to take a fresh look at where our users were experiencing friction and spend some time rethinking the UI in those areas to create the best possible experience.

One excellent example of something that we’ve consistently seen be challenging for Miva users is product sorting.

For customers who do a lot of product merchandising, the order in which products appear in each category is important and may be subject to frequent change. Though Miva has great tools for product sorting, we have found that it’s not always clear to users which sorting option they should use.

Let’s take a look at the menu on the batch list for sorting:

This menu uses icons that users must hover over to discern the meaning, making it difficult to quickly determine which option they should use.

There are 3 different sorting icons represented here:

Not only do the icons not offer much helpful information, but there are some important functions of each option that the user should be made aware of before selecting them. The first two options (Alphabetical and Display Order Menu) can change how products are sorted in runtime (when the customer is viewing the site) while the 3rd option (Sort) will only affect product sorting in the admin view.

Confusing, right?

This lack of clarity has led to a poor user experience for some Miva customers. These types of experiences are the exact thing we are improving in the Miva 10 redesign. We had decided from the start that we didn’t just want to change things for the sake of change.

We believe the results speak for themselves.

We have a lot of exciting things coming, all of which aim to make the Miva experience the absolute best it can be. Stay tuned!

 

About The Author

Brennan Heyde

Brennan has worked at Miva for the past 11 years in multiple roles and is currently the VP of Product. He works closely with Miva’s third-party developers, agencies, and partners, supporting their existing needs while growing the Miva partner ecosystem. Brennan helps guide the strategic direction of the Miva Merchant platform, ensuring Miva is always on the cutting-edge and providing effective solutions for customer problems.