Made by Michael
From slider to surface — and the path to acquisition.
Replaced an order-item slider with a full-page detailed view, redesigned the order list, and added a discreet kebab + drawer for sales-floor cost and pricing — designed around the constraint that nothing private should appear on screen while a customer is over the tailor's shoulder.
Brief
Order management in Taper was a side-slider summary. Three converging needs landed on the same surface at once: feature parity with the legacy NetSuite system tenants ran on (so migrations could complete), margin reporting for an existing tenant requesting it, and bespoke garment pricing for the travelling-tailor use case.
Problem
Admins couldn't see the cost-of-goods breakdown at item or order level — every margin question had to be answered in the legacy system. Sales-floor advisors couldn't price-the-client (override the calculated price for a specific garment) or hide the price during a fitting. Tenant migrations from the legacy NetSuite system were blocked on COGS parity — without it, migrating customers lost margin visibility they had before.
My role
I led the order-page redesign end-to-end:
- Order list redesign — table cards, filters, breakdown documentation
- Order page detail view — slider replaced with a full-page surface
- COGS UI in the design flow and on the order page
- Discreet entry-point pattern (kebab + drawer) for sensitive pricing data
- Permission model with engineering — admins gate visibility per role
Margin visible to admins, discretion preserved on the floor.
Feature parity with the legacy system unblocked the migration path the parent company's preferred acquirer needed. The discreet kebab + drawer pattern gave admins margin visibility without compromising the sales floor — privacy as a UI requirement, not a permission policy.
Order list — table cards + filters
The order list was redesigned around table cards (so the eye scans a row, not a grid of cells) with filters for stage, customer, and date. Documented for the team — rules for breakdowns, filter behaviour, sort defaults — so the pattern can extend to other admin tables.
Slider → full-page detail
The order item used to live in a slide-out panel on the side of the screen — fine for a quick edit, terrible for the level of detail an advisor or admin needed. Replaced with a full-page view that gave room for the COGS breakdown, conflicts, fit profile, and design-option summary.
The kebab + drawer (the lateral move)
The COGS data is sensitive — it includes margin information no client should ever see. But the screen is shared with the client by definition: the tailor stands shoulder-to-shoulder during a fitting. Rather than guard with passwords or warnings, I made the entry-point itself discreet. A small kebab menu next to the summary button reveals a drawer that the advisor opens deliberately. Closing the drawer hides everything. Default-OFF permissions mean most staff don't see the kebab at all.
This is the lateral move — privacy as a UI requirement, not a permission policy.
Permission-gated by default
Admins opt staff in. New users default to no COGS, no Price Management — they don't even see the kebab. Reduces accidental disclosure, works with the discreet entry-point pattern, and keeps permissions tunable without code changes. The same setting controls Price Management, the show/hide override, and the custom-price feature.
Refresh-from-source + line-by-line breakdown
COGS values come from the legacy system; they can drift if a fabric surcharge is updated upstream. The drawer has an explicit Refresh button that re-polls the source and recalculates — visible action, no silent staleness.
The breakdown is line-by-line, matching the format migrating users already knew: fabric base cost, fabric surcharge (large size, double breast), CMT (basic CMT plus lining and design-option surcharges), and the running total. RTW (ready-to-wear) orders use a per-unit variant with an aggregate large-size surcharge line and an RTW discount.
What I learned
The most interesting constraint on this project wasn't software — it was the body. The tailor stands next to the client; the screen is shared by force. That physical fact ruled out half the patterns I'd have used in any other admin tool — modal warnings, role-banners, password gates. The kebab + drawer wasn't the most discoverable choice, but it was the right one for the room. Designing for the room, not just the screen, is the lesson I'll bring to every B2B sales-floor project from here.